


unsettled nighttime creatures

by asael



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Assassins & Hitmen, Canonical Character Death, Gun Violence, Implied/Referenced Abuse, M/M, Nightmares, Slow Burn, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-03-20 17:12:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 45,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13722282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asael/pseuds/asael
Summary: Before the events of the books, Adam accepts an offer from the Gray Man. His collision with the Greywaren is inevitable, but this time he has even more secrets to hide.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So I've been working on this on and off since, no joke, [last August](http://asaelfic.tumblr.com/post/163836668083/i-dont-have-a-fic-for-the-last-day-of-pynchweek). That's enough! I'm not done but I'm gonna start posting it now and just keep writing with my fingers crossed. Maybe I'll uh... finish it by this August? I'll update tags and such as I go along. I have no idea if this will eventually have explicit content or not, but since it's me, it's not unlikely - if that turns out to be the case I'll change the rating, too.
> 
> Thank you to Rae and Kels for saying nice things to me, and thank you to everyone who reads my fics and thinks they're all right. The fic title is from a Zella Day song.

The Gray Man’s car broke down. That was how it started.

They were meant to be reliable, rental cars. They were meant to be disposable, the sort of thing that you don’t need to worry about breaking or being broken. Pay some extra money, get a new one without a torn fan belt or a broken window or blood on the fender. The last one was really better dealt with by leaving the car and walking away, of course.

The point was, the Gray Man’s rental car breaking down should have been no more than an inconvenience. He would call the company and get it taken care of. It would mean a wait, but likely not more than a few hours - long enough for an employee to bring him a new car. Or perhaps he’d simply request a ride to the airport instead. He could always get an earlier flight. 

He was done here, after all. He’d disposed of the tire iron that had smashed Niall Lynch’s head in, and he’d disposed of the body in the necessary way - a warning to any associates. A reminder to those who knew what Niall Lynch had been about, who might know where the item was that the Gray Man’s employer wanted. Though his flight was scheduled for the next morning - though he had another night in the charming little bed and breakfast he’d found here - the job was done. He didn’t really need a new car.

Still, it was inconvenient to find himself on the side of a country road outside a country town, miles from anything of note. That, he thought, could in the end also be placed at the feet of Niall Lynch, who had chosen to found his kingdom in the secluded countryside. But it felt rather distasteful to blame a dead man.

He exited the car and placed a call to the company, who promised they would send an employee to pick him and their car up. It would be awhile, though. The rental company was near the airport, and he - well. He was not near the airport.

The Gray Man contemplated his surroundings. Scrubby fields, some trees, a distant house. A mile or two back, he’d passed a factory of some sort. Ideally, there’d be a diner nearby to feed hungry workers coming off late shifts, but he didn’t remember seeing one. Too bad. He wasn’t hungry, but there were a few flecks of blood on his shoes that he ought to remove before the rental company employee arrived. He’d been careful, but these things happened. A diner bathroom would have been perfect.

A few cars passed, none stopping or even slowing down. The Gray Man considered his options.

And then the boy appeared.

He was on a bicycle, an old and rusted thing that had certainly seen better days. He slowed down and stopped. The Gray Man took him in, and decided that his whole appearance, in fact, spoke of someone who’d grown up in a place that had seen better days. 

His hair was the same color as Henrietta dirt, his skin tanned from the sun and dusted with freckles. His clothes looked exactly like the sort of clothes someone would buy from a thrift store - not to be fashionable, as seemed to be the thing these days, but because you needed to look decent and could not afford anything better. The sort of clothes that someone else has worn before, but decided were not good enough for them.

His eyes were blue, and he was thin, and he had a purpling bruise over one eye socket and down across his cheekbone. From a closed fist, the Gray Man thought.

“Car break down?” the boy said. His voice was soft, and thick with Henrietta drawl, the sort of thing that would have middle-aged ladies cooing over him if he were a bit more charming. 

But he wasn’t. He held himself carefully, the tension in his body providing the subtle feeling of distance. It was the sort of thing that made someone seem unconsciously unwelcoming, a quiet wariness that would read to most as disinterest.

To the Gray Man, it read as caution. It read as something familiar, and he found himself inclined to like this boy. He’d trained that distance out of himself - not that he no longer felt it, but he no longer showed it. It helped if people liked him, sometimes. For work.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s a rental. Someone will be out soon.”

“I could take a look at it,” the boy said. His eyes flickered to the Gray Man’s hands. He was standing carefully a few feet away, still on his bike, ready to pedal away in a moment if he needed to. 

It was smart, though it would not have been enough if the Gray Man had had nefarious intentions. That was not the boy’s fault, though. His experience with evil had likely been more venal: untrained, harsh blows and harsher words. Enough to teach him to be wary, but not enough to protect him from everything.

“You don’t have somewhere to be?” the Gray Man said. Perhaps he should have refused, but he did not want to wait on the side of the road for hours.

“My shift doesn’t start for another half hour. I’ve got some time.” The boy gestured down the road, toward the factory. He looked young to be working - a teenager. Seventeen, maybe? The Gray Man supposed that was old enough to work in a factory. He was not entirely sure about Virginia’s laws on the subject.

“By all means, then,” he said, and popped the hood. The boy slid off his bike and propped it nearby, needing to kick a few times at the rusty kickstand before it would hold the bike up properly. He slid another look at the Gray Man, quick and wary, which the Gray Man would not have noticed if he hadn’t been who he was. Then he bent over the engine.

While the boy performed whatever arcane magics were necessary in a situation like this, the Gray Man watched the road. He watched the boy, really, but focused attention would seem odd.

The Gray Man didn’t spend much time around teenagers. They were another species whose lives did not intersect with his own very often - probably a good thing. Despite his unfamiliarity with teenagers as a category, though, he did not think this boy was a typical example. Oh, he seemed that way - unexceptional, quiet, a little awkward - but there were little tells here and there, tiny things that would have been difficult for anyone else to put a finger on.

The only teenagers the Gray Man had been in any proximity to recently had been Niall Lynch’s sons, and this boy was an entirely different creature. He faced the world with a wariness and caution that was extremely recognizable, a wariness that spoke of familiarity with the less savory parts of the world. He was suspicious of the Gray Man, but still polite enough to offer help. He was careful enough to keep his distance, but not quite aware enough to understand the true extent of the danger he could be in.

Though, of course, he wasn’t. The Gray Man meant him no harm, had no intention of hurting him. It was curious, that’s all, that this Henrietta boy was observant enough to know something was off about the man on the side of the road. 

It was curious. It was familiar.

After all, the Gray Man had spent his own childhood learning about the cruelty of man. He was well aware that he was not the only one for whom that was true. The fist-shaped bruise on the boy’s face could have been from a schoolyard fight, but the way he carried it said otherwise. The way he carried it said that it was not a badge of courage, but a stain of violence.

Perhaps he was going soft, seeing himself in the image of a strange boy. Perhaps it was the knowledge that he had just taught three other boys, about as old as this one, a brutal lesson in the cruelty of the world.

He wondered if they had found the body yet.

“That should get you going again,” said the boy, straightening up from where he was bent over the engine. There was grease on his hands now, and he fished an already grease-covered rag out of his pocket to wipe it off. Even then, there were streaks of it left. It didn’t seem out of place.

“That seemed easy. Thank you,” the Gray Man said, nodding in simple appreciation. 

The boy ventured something like a smile, there and gone again in a moment. “It was nothing much. I work at Boyd’s auto shop in town - if you have more trouble, bring it by later.”

An auto shop and a factory. Busy, for a teenager, the Gray Man thought, aware that his own ideas of how teenagers spent their time were vague and likely incorrect. Two jobs seemed uncommon, though. Likely he needed the money.

“There’s a gas station a mile or two down the road,” the boy continued after a moment. His eyes slid away from the Gray Man, down to the ground, to the Gray Man’s shoes and then to his bike. An escape route. “Bathrooms are in the back, usually unlocked. You could clean up there.”

Perhaps another man would have been concerned. Perhaps the Gray Man should have been concerned - once word got out of the murder of Niall Lynch, this boy could tell anyone who asked that he’d met a stranger on the road not too far from the Lynch property with blood on his shoes. But there was nothing to be concerned about, not really. The rental car was under an assumed name, and he would be gone the next day.

If there was really a concern, he could take care of it now. The road was empty, the boy was defenseless. It would be easy. He wasn’t worried.

“Thank you,” the Gray Man said again, polite. He could hide the boy’s body in the woods, if he needed to. “Are you looking for a job?”

He could not have said what inspired that. He was, in some distant way, aware - the echo of his younger self in this thin and distant Henrietta boy, the wariness in his eyes. The observant nature and the cleverness, the work ethic and stubbornness of two jobs at seventeen years old. The knowledge of the darker side of humanity.

More practically, it would be useful to have someone around who was good with cars.

The boy’s eyes flickered from the bike to the Gray Man again, widening. He still looked as though he was about to flee. Smart.

“I have a job,” he said, but it lacked the ring of _no_ that the Gray Man had expected.

“Of course,” the Gray Man said. “This would be more like an apprenticeship, in any case.” He was quite surprised at how appealing the thought seemed in that moment. He was not a lonely person - he had had students before, of course, though not in this particular field. But this was different, and he knew that. “On-the-job training, if you will.”

For a moment, he saw in the boy’s face the truth of things. He wanted out. It was written in the set of his jaw, the brief, intense flash of interest in his eyes. Then he shuttered his expression, smoothed it out, replaced it with polite caution.

The Gray Man approved.

“I can’t really up and leave, sir. I’m starting at Aglionby Academy in the fall.”

“Education is important,” said the Gray Man. “But if you change your mind, I’ll be here until tomorrow.” He gave the boy a number - not his. It would connect him to the main desk of the bed and breakfast. 

From another angle, the Gray Man might be acting very foolishly. These were clues, breadcrumbs that could be used to trace him. But they wouldn’t be. That flash of interest had been enough to make it clear - interest instead of fear, despite the blood on his shoes, despite everything about the situation.

The boy likely wouldn’t call, but he wouldn’t turn the number over to anyone, either. It was safe enough, within the parameters of safety that the Gray Man considered important. It was unlike him, though. He knew that even as he did it, and he did it anyway, because the shadows in the boy’s eyes were so like his own.

“Thank you,” the boy said, somewhat uncertainly. He tucked the number into his pocket, along with the greasy rag, and mounted his bike. “It was nice to meet you, sir.” There was a significant amount of doubt in his voice. The Gray Man almost smiled.

He watched the boy bike away toward the factory, and then he called the rental company back to tell them he no longer needed help, climbed back in the car, and drove to the gas station to clean the blood off his shoes.

He did not expect to hear from the boy again. He weighed the variables, considered his actions, and put the incident out of his mind. It had been out of the norm for him, and that made him a little uncomfortable, but he understood the emotions driving it. The feeling of kinship toward a young boy with bruises on his face and a cautious air around people. He understood it, even if he was not entirely comfortable with the reminder that he was still haunted.

But it didn’t really matter, because nothing would come of it.

Of course, he was wrong. The phone in the charming little room he’d taken at Henrietta’s third-finest bed and breakfast rang very late that night. 

The Gray Man had spent his day getting his affairs in order - not that they’d really needed it. He’d done what he came to do, and all that was left was checking in with his employer. That was easily accomplished, and the rest of the day spent eating at pleasant little cafes and packing his luggage. Not that there was much of that, either. 

It was lucky that the proprietors were still awake, and able to transfer the call. It was lucky that the Gray Man was awake, considering how near the clock’s hands were to midnight. Or perhaps it wasn’t luck at all.

The boy’s voice was steady, but the Gray Man could hear a tightness in it. Whether that was from tears unshed or pain unvoiced, he couldn’t tell over the phone, though it would have been clear in a moment had they been meeting in person.

“Your offer,” the boy said, “is it real?”

“Yes,” the Gray Man said. The unexpectedness of the call piqued his interest even more than their meeting on the side of the road had. He could guess why, but it was a strange marvel that such a cautious boy would consider taking such a leap.

“Where would we go?”

“Away.”

The Gray Man listened to the boy breathe for a moment. He was, the Gray Man thought, the sort of person who wanted plans and facts, which the Gray Man would not - at least at this moment in time - give. It remained to be seen whether that would be too much for the boy.

“And I’m not going to end up dead in a ditch somewhere?”

There was no amusement in his voice. The question was an honest one, which pleased the Gray Man. He also quite liked the way the boy’s Henrietta accent curled around the words _dead in a ditch_. This really was an awfully charming town.

“I can’t make any promises,” said the Gray Man. Honesty, he thought, was the best way to get started. “But probably not.”

There was another moment of silence. It was an agonizing moment of decision for the boy, he was sure. For the Gray Man, it was a quiet moment of contemplation. He had truly meant the offer, or he would not have extended it, but now that it might be accepted he felt an uncharacteristic moment of uncertainty.

He could not be said to be good with teenagers, having had little practice. This life of his could not be said to be a good life, exactly, though it suited him quite well. He generally did not work with a partner, and he had never trained someone.

Still. It could be very interesting, perhaps even rewarding.

“Okay,” the boy said. He gave a location. When the Gray Man arrived, it turned out to be a pay phone - likely one of the last remaining in the town. The boy had walked a long way to get to it. There was a newly-made bruise on the side of his jaw, overlapping with the last one, and the Gray Man could see from the way he moved that he had more hidden bruises, or perhaps a cracked rib. A black eye was forming as well.

Much later, the Gray Man learned what had happened that night, the events that preceded the phone call. Having found the boy’s Aglionby Academy acceptance letter, his father was furious. He expressed that fury with fists and spat-out words, making it clear that he would not support this choice - that they could not afford it, that the boy was wasting his time and his parents’ money, that he was meant for nothing. The boy, unable to fight back, could only accept the anger. 

Later, the Gray Man thought that it would have turned out differently if they had not met on the road. The boy was stubborn, determined, ambitious. His father’s anger would not have crushed his dreams. The Gray Man understood anger like that - if it had not been the school, it would have been something else. The father’s anger would have cooled, and the boy would have found a way to that expensive, exclusive school, and on to greatness. The Gray Man’s place in this narrative had occurred entirely by chance.

But there he had been, offering a way out. And in the panic and pain and fear of that night, the boy had grasped what seemed like the only opportunity left to him. His determination had narrowed down to the simple need to _get out_ , by any means necessary, and he’d dialed a hit man’s number because nothing else had been available.

It was pathetic, really, how some people treated their family. The Gray Man had no regrets about helping this boy walk away from his, and the sight of new bruises layered over old was enough to settle his doubts about his own offer.

The boy dealt with the pain well, pretending it wasn’t there. That was a good sign. His eyes were bright with something that was only steps away from panic, and he climbed into the Gray Man’s rental with nothing but the cheap clothes on his back.

“What’s your name?” the Gray Man asked. It hadn’t mattered before. It did now.

The boy barely blinked. Panic or not, he was resolute now that his decision was made. That was also a good sign.

“Adam Parrish,” he said.

The Gray Man nodded. He glanced at his luggage in the back, making sure it was all there, and then he drove to the airport.

He couldn’t take a strange teenager back to his bed and breakfast, after all. Too suspicious. It was best to get started as soon as possible.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam settles in to his new life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm moving this month, so writing time is super limited. Thanks for your patience!

Adam couldn’t say what made him do what he did. He had always been a practical boy, not prone to acting out or flights of fancy - he couldn’t afford those things. Acting out would be punished thoroughly, flights of fancy wouldn’t get him anywhere. He had goals and the drive to work toward those goals, and if some nights all he could do was hold himself together and survive, then he did what he had to.

There had been so many nights where that was the case. Nights where he curled up on his thin mattress in his cramped room and struggled to remind himself why it was worth it. Why it would be worth it someday. Nights where he went outside in the cold because he felt the prickle of tears and he knew showing that kind of weakness in front of his father would receive disgust at best, anger at worst. Nights where he went to sleep hopeless and woke up with nothing but determination to hold himself together.

But that night he’d had a number and a way out. That night, it seemed like all his options were being torn away, his future destroyed before he could even try.

It probably hadn’t been like that. He probably could have found a path forward. But that night, there weren’t any in sight, and so he had called Mr. Gray.

It was foolish and terribly stupid. He’d seen the blood on the man’s shoes, he’d felt something off about him. He knew that he was not making the most intelligent choice, but he’d done it anyway.

He hadn’t even known the man’s name.

He learned it in Mr. Gray’s rental car on the way to the airport. Adam doubted that was the name the man had been born with, but he didn’t particularly care. Now that he had made his choice, he would not hesitate. If Mr. Gray had been a serial killer, Adam would have ended up no more than another name on his list, a name that no one would bother searching for.

He wasn’t, though. Adam already knew that. He was something else, maybe equally close to death but less predictable. More methodical.

Qualities that Adam admired in anyone.

They talked on the way to the airport, careful questions with honest answers, and Adam began to realize what he’d gotten himself into, but he wasn’t afraid. Mr. Gray meant him no harm and did not yet expect him to cause harm to others, though there was the implication that that could someday be necessary. How could there not be, considering the man’s line of work? 

He asked about Adam’s skills, his strengths, his abilities and his possible aptitude for things yet unlearned. Adam tried to be as honest as he could be.

“You won’t be coming back here anytime soon,” Mr Gray said, “but you might eventually.”  
Now that he was leaving, Adam felt a strange mixture of fear and longing. The world was an unknown place, and Mr. Gray’s world particularly so. Henrietta, as loathsome and tiring as it was, was all Adam had ever known. He felt fear at the thought of stepping out into all that unknown, longing at the idea that the world was before him.

The idea of coming back was not a pleasant one, but there was nothing Adam could do about that.

“That’s fine,” he said.

“Are your parents likely to file a missing persons report?”

Adam considered the question. The answer was obvious - that wasn’t what he needed to think about. Of course they wouldn’t. They would think he had run away, which was likely something they’d expected for awhile, and they would both curse him for removing his meager income from the family’s budget and be relieved to no longer have the complication of an ungrateful son in their lives.

His mother might miss him, maybe. She might bring up the idea of looking for him - he wanted to believe she would consider it, at least. But his father would never go to the police for any reason. Adam knew that. They would report nothing. He knew that.

It was admitting it that felt strange. He had no doubt that Mr. Gray had some idea of the sort of home he had come from - most people did, after the first few times they saw his bruises. But they hadn’t spoken of it, and Adam didn’t think they would. Admitting aloud that his parents did not care if he disappeared felt like crossing a line, like saying something he shouldn’t. Like all those times someone had asked him if he was all right and he’d said yes, that it had been an accident - it wasn’t a fist that caused that bruise, but an open door, a clumsy slip. It was like saying no instead. No, everything isn’t all right.

But that was stupid. Mr. Gray already knew.

“No. They won’t.”

Mr. Gray only nodded. Adam felt oddly weightless.

They drove to the airport. It seemed like it should have been more difficult, getting on a plane as a minor with a strange adult, but it was not. Adam was 17, old enough to fly alone, and he’d brought his ID. Mr. Gray procured another ticket - which was probably expensive, Adam thought, but he already owed the man enough that even more seemed meaningless - and accompanied him onto the plane.

It was the first time Adam had ever flown in a plane. He did not like it. Luckily, the flight was not long, but he told himself he would have to get used to it if he was going to walk this path. 

That was something he was still uncertain about. They had made no promises, negotiated no deals, but Adam owed Mr. Gray. He also had nothing else, now, having walked away from everything in his life. What little he had had before.

He would figure it out. He thought he would have that choice. He was beginning to understand Mr. Gray, bit by bit. Maybe.

Mr. Gray’s home was a small but well-furnished apartment in a large city. It did not feel lived in, exactly, but Adam quite liked it anyway. There were bookshelves filled with books, most of them about subjects Adam knew very little about. Anglo-Saxon poetry, rock music, a few novels he’d heard of but never read. The furniture was comfortable, the decor relaxed. 

Adam, looking at the books, wondered what a hitman did in his personal time. He supposed he would find out.

“I’ve got an extra room I’ve been using as a study. You can stay in there.”

Mr. Gray did not seem particularly thrown by the fact that he had just acquired a teenage boy. Either he had in some way planned for this, or he was the sort of person who was thrown by very little. Adam thought it was probably the latter.

He showed Adam to the room, which did not have a bed but did have a comfortable-looking sofa. There were more bookshelves and a desk with a slim, expensive-looking laptop. Adam felt out of place there, in his secondhand clothes and bruises, but not as out of place as he had expected to feel. He looked at Mr. Gray.

“What am I going to be doing?”

Mr. Gray looked back at him. He was an odd man, Adam thought. At first glance, he seemed calm and open and normal - and probably most people didn’t look past that first glance. Probably there was no need to, usually. But past that was something else, something cold and assessing, watching every angle of the situation, observing in a way that made Adam wary.

But beyond that - beyond that was something else, something Adam could not have properly described if he tried. It was what had made it possible for Adam to say yes to this offer, despite the many clear reasons to say no. Maybe it was the way he looked at Adam’s bruises, with a calm familiarity rather than the quiet horror followed by distance that most people showed. Maybe it was his manner, coolly competent in a way that Adam could not help but admire.

Adam didn’t know. But part of him still could not quite believe that this was real, that he had left Henrietta.

“That depends on what you want to do,” Mr. Gray said finally. “Let us start with honesty, and you can decide from there.”

And then he told Adam what his job consisted of.

His explanation was detailed without being gory, without descending into gloating or horror stories. The way he spoke of his own actions made it very clear, at least to Adam, that he saw it as a job. Killing people was not something he took joy in, it was simply something he was very good at.

But killing people was what he did, and he did not attempt to paint it in a different light.

Adam listened in silence, and he thought.

He wondered if he would be able to kill another human being. He was forced to come to the conclusion that, probably, he would be. Most people would be capable of that, in extreme circumstances, but not all could kill the way Mr. Gray did - setting their emotions aside. Could Adam?

Probably. Sometimes his body didn’t feel like his own. Sometimes the world didn’t feel like his own. Sometimes he had no choice but to pack away his own emotions in order to get through an hour, or a moment, or a day.

Adam knew that was an effect of abuse. He’d read about it. He thought, now, that he understood a little more about why Mr. Gray had made him the offer. He didn’t say it aloud, though. He didn’t think either of them wanted to discuss that.

“You can leave if you want,” Mr. Gray said when he was finished. “I’ll take you somewhere else. You won’t be able to find me again. Or you can stay.”

Adam thought the choice was an honest one. He thought, at this point, that Mr. Gray would not kill him - would simply let him go, catch and release, leave him to find his own way in the world outside of Henrietta. And maybe Adam would be able to.

But he knew that wasn’t what he wanted.

“I’ll stay,” Adam said, meeting Mr. Gray’s eyes. 

“Good,” Mr. Gray said. “Get some rest. Then we’ll get started.”

So Adam did.

The next eight months were an entirely new sort of education for Adam. He continued studying what he should have been learning as a junior in high school, through rather expensive-seeming distance education and home study. Adam had insisted, early on, that he would still obtain a high school diploma and would continue on to college - an insistence that Mr. Gray agreed with easily and completely. 

The rest of Adam’s education was more idiosyncratic. He learned how to find information - via observation, the internet, and a hundred other tiny ways. He learned how to pick a lock and in returned showed Mr. Gray the fastest way to steal a car, knowledge from his days at Boyd’s Auto Body. He learned how to tap a phone, how to shoot a gun, the most easily-destroyed parts of the human body.

He had trouble learning how to fight. Mr. Gray did not force him. He focused on guns instead - how to repair them, different makes, hitting a target. Adam had no particular interest in guns, but he was quite good at it. 

He knew, of course, why it was easier for him to shoot a gun than punch a person. Mr. Gray knew too. But they didn’t talk about it - Mr. Gray simply told him that one day he would need to learn, but that it could wait. Adam was not in any position where he would need to fight like that, anyway.

He wasn’t in a position to shoot anyone, either. He helped Mr. Gray, but was kept firmly out of the jobs themselves, working in a supporting capacity instead. He drove for them, monitored situations from their hotel rooms, found information that was more easily available to a polite southern-accented teenager than a somewhat intimidating adult man. He traveled more than he had ever imagined he would. He made himself useful, and Mr. Gray did not hesitate to tell him when he had helped.

It was gratifying in a way that Adam wasn’t used to. Mr. Gray did not flatter him, did not exclaim over his successes. He simply told Adam with quiet honesty what he thought of Adam’s skills, how well he was improving. He was unstinting with criticism as well, correcting Adam’s mistakes with cool composure - which only made the praise mean more.

Adam had always liked impressing his teachers. Impressing Mr. Gray was something else entirely, particularly because he turned out to be _good_ at most of what he was asked to do.

It took a sort of distance, sometimes. Problem-solving and practicality and an ability to think on one’s feet. Adam had never really considered these qualities in relation to him, but he saw how well they served Mr. Gray, and at times he could see them in himself, as well. Adam was not the sort to have unnecessary pride in his own skills - quite the opposite. But he could not deny that he was good at this, and he could not help being pleased by it.

He thought, at first, that the work itself would be difficult to reconcile with. These were people’s lives he was helping Mr. Gray take, and there was no reason to think they were all evil people. And - well. It wasn’t _easy_ , but it was easier than Adam expected.

This bothered him, sometimes. Not the actions themselves - though those were difficult to swallow occasionally - but his own ease with them. He thought he should be more conflicted, more frightened of what he might be becoming. But Mr. Gray was not an evil man, and that was what confused Adam more than anything.

He had seen blood on Mr. Gray’s hands. He had helped dispose of bodies. He had seen death, and he knew who dealt it.

But Mr. Gray was not cruel. He did what was necessary for the jobs he was hired for, and no more. He did not take pleasure in the pain he dealt, or in death. If he took pleasure in anything, it was a job that went well, accomplishing the task he had set out to do. The fact that that task involved murder was beside the point.

And he was never, ever cruel to Adam.

They learned each other slowly, in fits and start, both reticent with words and unwilling to open up. Both having been taught, through long years of pain, that it was better not to. But Adam learned that Mr. Gray took real pleasure in discussing the Anglo-Saxon poetry he loved, and Mr. Gray learned that Adam took a deep, secret enjoyment from very old-school country music. 

He did not move quickly around Adam if Adam was not expecting it, and he did not raise his voice, and Adam realized neither of those things until they had already been together for a couple months. Until he realized he wasn’t constantly, unconsciously bracing for a blow anymore.

Adam had more nightmares of the years he’d spent with his father than the months he’d spent with Mr. Gray. This did not surprise him.

He was in no rush to join Mr. Gray’s particular profession, and Mr. Gray seemed in no rush for him to do so. He did not ask to come on the actual missions, the final ones, and Mr. Gray did not ask him to. They didn’t talk about it, but both were content to allow Adam to act as backup, as support, and to keep him from the actual bloody-handed business of murder.

For now.

Adam had no illusions about what he was doing. In assisting Mr. Gray, those deaths were on his conscience as well. But taking a life himself was a line he wasn’t yet ready to cross, and though they hadn’t spoken of it, he knew that Mr. Gray would never press him to do so. Mr. Gray would allow him to make his choice in his own time, and if that choice was finally to walk away, he would allow that, too.

They trusted each other. To Adam, it was nearly inconceivable, and it appeared without him realizing it. Mr. Gray was not his father, or even a father figure. He did not view Adam as a son, nor even perhaps as a protege. 

Adam didn’t quite know what they were. But he trusted Mr. Gray, and had earned trust in return, and they worked together better than he would have imagined. After all, Adam wasn’t good with people.

Perhaps, in a way, they were friends.

And that’s how it was, until Greenmantle - Mr. Gray’s main employer, who Adam had never met - sent him on the trail of the Greywaren again.

They sat at the dining table in Mr. Gray’s apartment. There were files spread out before them, the fruits of Mr. Gray’s previous investigations.

“We’ll go back to Henrietta,” Mr. Gray said. It was not a request, not quite an order. Simply a statement. He looked at Adam for a moment.

Adam felt his gut clench. It had been months since he’d seen his father, months since he’d seen the dust of the trailer park or the rolling hills outside Henrietta. He didn’t want to go back. He could say no, probably.

Instead, he nodded. 

“There aren’t many leads, beyond the Lynch family. I had thought that finding his father’s body would shake something loose from the oldest -” and here, Mr. Gray pulled a thin file from the mess in front of them. It read _Declan Lynch_. “But instead it seems the middle boy found him. Declan has said nothing, but not because he knows nothing. I can’t be sure about the others.”

He twitched two more files out of the stack. One read _Matthew Lynch_ , the other _Ronan Lynch_. He looked at Adam.

“You told me you were accepted to Aglionby Academy. They all go there, so this could be an opportunity. Your acceptance still stands - I’ll tell them that you simply could not start until now due to family responsibilities. Go to Aglionby and learn what you can from the Lynch brothers.”

It sounded simple enough. Adam had done similar things already - gotten close to the son or daughter or younger brother of a target, learned things they needed to know for the job they’d been given.

“It might not be easy. This may take longer than usual, since you’ll need to gain their trust, and they are - understandably - likely to be wary,” Mr. Gray said. “While you do that, I’ll learn what I can on my own.”

Adam nodded. Their father had been brutally murdered. He doubted they would give away any information easily, much less anything about this Greywaren that Greenmantle wanted so badly. This would be harder than when he’d done this before, but he thought he could do it.

Going back to Henrietta would be the hard part, but - Aglionby. It had been his one shining hope, once, his one path out. It wasn’t anymore - he was already out - but still. _Still._

Maybe it was silly and childish, but Adam wanted to go.

He slid the files toward himself and flipped them open, one by one. Declan Lynch. Older, sleek and charismatic, excellent grades, lots of friends. Matthew Lynch. The youngest, amiable and easy, not particularly good grades but even more friends than his brother. 

Ronan Lynch. The middle brother. There were two photos, and Adam could see why. One was older - before his father had been killed. He had an amused smile with just a hint of sharpness to it, dark curls, and an uncomplicated demeanor. The second one showed something else entirely: a boy like a snarling wolf, sharp and fierce, all shaved head and angles and leather with some kind of tattoo crawling up his neck, sneering at something to the side of the camera. 

He looked dangerous. Adam gazed at the photo for moment longer, wary and unwilling to admit he might be interested, before turning his attention to the rest of the file. It was more of the same: grades that had been middling before, fallen sharply downhill. Though he had not, apparently, been the friendly type at any point in his life, it seemed that now his friends and associates had dwindled to almost none.

He would be in the same year as Adam.

Either of the others would probably be easier to get close to than that thorny creature, Adam knew. 

He flipped the file closed. He would attend Aglionby and see how things went. A moment ago, he’d thought that this was similar to things that he had done before, but now he wasn’t so sure. It wouldn’t be a couple days, a shared meal, a fake friendliness. He would have to win the trust of at least one of the Lynch brothers.

Matthew would probably be the easiest. Declan would probably know the most.

Ronan was the one whose face stayed in Adam’s mind.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They finally collide.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really am not intending for updates to this fic to take so long, but life has gotten very busy this past month. Hopefully I'll have more time to write soon. And thank you for your patience!

Ronan didn’t notice the new kid until Latin class, because Ronan had skipped all the other classes so far that day.

He wouldn’t even have noticed the kid then - or at least wouldn’t have _admitted_ noticing them - except that Gansey was interested in him.

It wasn’t that uncommon to have new students join in the middle of the school year. They’d usually been off with traveling parents, taught by a tutor in some distant country until work brought their parents back to the US - to DC - when they’d send precious Mortimer Jr. off to boarding school. Or sometimes it was because a stuck up asshole with too much money and too few brain cells had caused trouble at their old school and needed to be moved. 

Whatever the reason, new faces in the middle of Aglionby’s school year weren’t the kind of thing that provoked much excitement. The more nosy students would ferret out what they could about the new student, spread the rumors to anyone who cared, but unless they were something interesting or especially stupid no one paid too much attention. Ronan, especially, didn’t see why he should care. He hated 95 percent of the other Aglionby students. What was one more, give or take?

But the second Ronan took his usual seat behind Gansey, he could tell it was going to be different this time. Gansey was deep in conversation with the new kid, animated and very clearly charmed, prattling on about that Welsh king of his.

If he was already talking about that, Ronan was probably fucked. He’d never be able to pry Gansey off the kid. He glowered. Coming to class had been a shitty idea anyway, he’d only done it because Gansey’s concern from the door of Ronan’s room that morning when he didn’t even bother to try to drag himself out of bed had made him feel guilty. But now he was at Aglionby, hungover as hell and watching Gansey slobbering all over some skinny guy.

“Ronan, you came,” Gansey said, turning in his seat. His eyes were bright. Ronan didn’t know if that annoyingly pleased smile was because of his presence or Gansey’s new friend, but either way he responded by grunting and leaning back in his chair. He should have stayed in bed. The light from the room’s windows was making his head pound.

“This is my friend and roommate, Ronan Lynch,” Gansey said, turning back to the other boy. “I’d say he’s not usually like this, but that would be a lie.”

“It’s fine,” the boy said. His voice was quiet and deliberate, like he was choosing his words carefully. “He looks tired.”

“Hungover, I believe,” Gansey said with a certain tone of judgment that Ronan knew was meant for him to hear. It only served to make his mood even worse.

He peered at the new kid, who was still focused on Gansey. Thin, high cheekbones with a spray of faint freckles, sort of a weird-looking face. Dusty brown hair, tanned skin. His uniform looked new, like this was the first time he’d ever worn it, and it probably was. His slender fingers were playing with a pencil, his textbook and a notebook carefully set on the desk in front of him.

“Be decent for half a second, Lynch,” Gansey said. “This is Adam Parrish. He just started here at Aglionby.”

“No shit,” Ronan said, rolling his eyes expressively. Adam Parrish looked at him then, which Ronan instantly did not like.

Parrish had blue eyes, darker than Ronan’s own, a little wide-set but sharp and intelligent. That was the part Ronan didn’t like - Parrish’s gaze was too observant, flickering from Ronan’s face to his shaved head to his hands, and Ronan felt like he was seeing too much. The cut where he’d bitten his lip, the fact his hair was getting just a little too long and he needed to buzz it again, the split skin on his knuckles from punching a wall.

He didn’t like it, so he scowled at Adam Parrish. Parrish’s brows drew down a little, as if he was going to scowl back, but he took a breath and it smoothed away.

Gansey looked rather disappointed in Ronan, which Ronan ignored. “Adam helped me out this morning. That sound the Pig’s been making - he knew exactly what was causing it. Can you believe that? He heard it in the parking lot and came over to let me know, and then he showed me how to fix it.” He smiled at Parrish, and Ronan was not pleased to see that it was a genuine smile. This wasn’t Richard Campbell Gansey the Third making nice with an Aglionby brat, it was Gansey, obsessed with Welsh kings and impractical cars, meeting a new friend.

Parrish was going to stick around, unless he decided he hated Gansey. In that moment, Ronan knew it.

What a shitty day.

Somewhere in his mind, Ronan knew he was being childish. Gansey had other friends - half the campus considered him a friend, and on top of that there was Noah. But right then, he didn’t care.

“Then why doesn’t he fucking get a mechanic job instead of coming to this shitty school?” Ronan said, lip curling. He watched Parrish’s mouth tighten, his eyes grow sharp, his shoulders tense and then relax. His jab had hit close to home, only Ronan had no idea why.

“My dad taught me how to work on cars,” Parrish said, his tone polite and easy. But Ronan had seen that flare of temper, and maybe it should have made him dislike Parrish more, but - instead, he was oddly pleased at the way Parrish met his eyes, steady and a little heated. His weird bone structure looked interesting from this angle - it was the way the shadows fell across his face, maybe. Like something out of a dream.

Abruptly, Ronan’s moment of good humor vanished. He let the legs of his chair fall to the ground with a thump, but before he could find the right thing to say to wipe that politeness off Adam Parrish’s face, their teacher walked in.

Barrington Whelk was an equally worthy target for Ronan’s disdain, and an altogether easier one. Ronan shut Parrish out with deliberate distance, devoted himself to being the most uncooperative student possible, and ignored Gansey’s look of disappointment.

But, as Ronan had expected, Parrish didn’t go away.

He seemed to have attached himself firmly to Gansey, which Ronan uncharitably attributed to his apparent inability to make other friends. A few of the other Aglionby boys had tried - Tad Carruthers, in particular, seemed immune to Parrish’s obvious disinterest - but nothing stuck. Or rather, Parrish didn’t seem to want anything to stick.

Ronan didn’t give a shit about Parrish, really, but as Gansey’s newest project Ronan had an obligation to keep some kind of an eye on him. So he seemed to be the only one who noticed how careful Parrish was about keeping some kind of distance between himself and the other students.

Parrish lived on campus, like Matthew and a host of other boys who either liked campus life or didn’t have the confidence to move off-campus. He had a roommate, but never spent any time with him - never seemed to spend any time in his room. If he wasn’t in class, he was in the library. If he wasn’t in the library, he was with Gansey, or somewhere else that didn’t require social interaction with other students.

When Tad or one of the others tried to talk to him, asking about his parents or where he’d lived before or how he did so well in class after spending half the year somewhere else, Parrish would clam up or redirect the conversation or just level that cool gaze of his and stop the line of questioning dead in its tracks. 

Ronan was not sure if it was deliberate or if Parrish was just an awkward social reject. He was good enough at talking to Gansey, after all - but since Gansey was secretly the king of awkward social rejects and just pretended not to be, that didn’t mean anything.

If it was deliberate, Ronan didn’t know why. There were a lot of little things about Parrish that were weird, but most of them could be chalked up to coming to a new school in the middle of the year. Others, well -

Ronan couldn’t figure out why Adam seemed so cautious when they were off-campus. Gansey was hardly ever able to coax him into town, not even to Nino's - the most Adam seemed willing to do was visit the store now and then when he needed supplies, or pick up takeout to eat at Monmouth. Even then, Adam's eyes were wary, the set of his shoulders more tense than usual.

He treated most of Henrietta like that, like he might catch a contagious disease from setting foot in it. Honestly, some days Ronan felt like that about the whole fucking world, so it’s not like he could blame Parrish much - but still. It was just kind of weird. Parrish had no problem hanging around them all the time on campus, but any invitation to anywhere in Henrietta besides Monmouth had even odds of being turned down.

On top of that, Parrish was disgustingly smart and seemed to spend most of his non-Gansey free time studying. He’d already impressed half their teachers and aced most of the tests he’d been given (though Ronan found some satisfaction from getting better grades in Latin, no matter how much Whelk hated him). 

The fact was, Ronan just didn’t _get_ Parrish. There was something about him that didn’t quite fit the seamless image of a rich Aglionby student that he tried to project, but Ronan couldn’t put his finger on it.

Gansey thought Ronan was just being a dick about having someone new hanging around. That wasn’t it, though Ronan could privately, grudgingly admit that that might be _part_ of it.

But Gansey loved Parrish. Noah liked him too, once they’d been introduced, and there was nothing Ronan could do to keep Parrish from popping up all the time after that.

He accepted it with bad grace, sniping at Parrish here and there, always experiencing a brief rush of savage pleasure when his barbs struck home, when Parrish would snap back at him or get icy or come close to losing his temper. Ronan wanted a fight, and while Parrish didn’t seem inclined to give him one, he also didn’t seem inclined to let Ronan walk over him.

Gansey attempted to keep the peace. It mostly worked. When it all got too frustrating, Ronan found a race or a bottle or a fight, but that wasn’t a change. That’s what he’d been doing for months. Ever since that day.

A couple weeks after Parrish appeared in their lives, Gansey dragged them all on another of his Glendower expeditions. A tromp through the woods, he said, because that was the kind of shit that Gansey said.

Ronan climbed into the Pig, rolling his eyes. Noah took the back, and they picked up Parrish in the Aglionby parking lot.

He wasn’t wearing his uniform - a rare thing. He wore jeans instead, and a soft-looking deep red t-shirt that made his blue eyes stand out. He looked relaxed in a way that he never looked in his uniform, his slim shoulders lacking the tension that they often seemed to have.

Ronan scowled as he climbed in, looking out the window instead. Parrish ignored his standoffishness, as he often did now, bumping fists with Gansey and settling in the back next to Noah, who grinned at him.

“It’s a lovely day for a hike,” Gansey said, and proceeded to explain where they were going and why. Ronan didn’t bother to listen, because he knew the basics. Where they were going: the woods somewhere, or some shit. Why: Gansey’s giant boner for a dead Welsh king.

He watched Parrish’s reflection in the windshield instead, listening to the soft murmur of his voice as he talked to Gansey. He just wanted to know what Parrish’s deal was. Was he sucking up to Gansey because of the prestige of his name? The money? Connections? Something else? He wasn’t like Ronan, who had nothing else. There was something up with him.

Maybe it was time to actually talk to Adam Parrish.

This was harder than he’d expected it to be. Parrish was a new addition, and that meant he had the attention of Gansey and Noah both. (And, Ronan reluctantly had to admit, him too - though for different reasons.) If Gansey wasn’t pointing out interesting rock formations or supposed signs of a ley line, Noah was hanging off Parrish, his cold hand pushing at a shoulder or ruffling his hair.

Ronan, who was watching, saw the way Parrish stiffened when touched unexpectedly. He tried to hide it, relaxing a moment later and gracing Noah with a faint, crooked smile, but Ronan saw it. He didn’t know what to make of it. Maybe mummy and daddy just didn’t hug the kid enough - not too strange for a rich Aglionby boy with distant parents.

Still, Ronan didn’t really think that was it.

He let himself be distracted by the air and the sun and the trees. For once, he wasn’t nursing a hangover, and he wasn’t even in a particularly terrible mood. Sure, Parrish was there, and Ronan wanted to figure out what was up with him, but even so it was good to get out of town. The woods were wild and strange, nothing like the Barns, but - it was all right.

Nothing could be like the Barns, anyway.

Ronan was jerked back into the present moment by Noah’s laughter as he nearly stumbled over Gansey, which descended into a flurry of gentle shoves and boyish shouting. Parrish fell back a little, clearly not wanting to be part of that, and Ronan saw his chance. He lengthened his stride, trying to seem casual about it, but when he got within speaking distance he didn’t know what to say.

Parrish glanced at him, a quick movement of his blue eyes, and nodded. It was a greeting, and a somewhat wary one. But he didn’t say anything, so they both walked in silence, listening to Gansey and Noah up ahead.

Ronan had just decided on what to say - something confrontational and kind of shitty, maybe to throw Parrish off guard but actually because that was the only way Ronan knew how to communicate sometimes - when he saw Parrish’s hand slide into his jeans pocket.

He retrieved his phone and bent his head over it for a moment. Ronan watched the way his hair fell into his eyes. It wasn’t unkempt, exactly, but it didn’t look like he went to a hairdresser who cost hundreds of dollars and only took appointments six months in advance like some Aglionby boys did. Parrish’s hair looked soft, and a little messy.

Ronan looked away. Parrish finished whatever text he was sending and slipped the phone back into his pocket.

“Your dad?” Ronan said, and he did at least manage to make it come out in a confrontational tone. Parrish didn’t blink, but it was something.

Ronan had seen him texting before - the same person, he was pretty sure, because Parrish didn’t have any friends besides Gansey. It had to be a friend from another school or a family member, and the one time Ronan had (accidentally!) seen the screen it had been a mundane question about how school was going. Asking Parrish if he’d made any friends.

So a parent, then.

Parrish looked at him. He seemed to be considering something for a long moment before he spoke.

“He’s not my dad.”

Which was not exactly what Ronan was expecting to hear. He didn’t know anything about Parrish’s family, so maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised, but - it was a weird thing to hear.

“My parents aren’t around,” Parrish continued, looking away and continuing down the forest path Gansey had found. His legs were shorter than Ronan’s, though not by much, so it wasn’t hard to keep up. “He’s my guardian.”

Ronan was not sure what to make of that. _My parents aren’t around._ It was just vague enough to mean pretty much anything. Dead parents, estranged parents, parents too rich to give a shit about their kid. He didn’t really want to ask. Fathers were not a subject that appealed.

“I heard about your dad,” Parrish said abruptly. Apparently fathers, as a subject, appealed to him just fine. Or maybe just when the subject wasn’t _his_ father. Ronan’s shoulders stiffened.

It wasn’t a secret. Niall Lynch’s death couldn’t have remained a secret, not with the brutal way he died, not with the parentless children he left behind after Aurora’s collapse. Not with Ronan’s impossible-to-ignore changes. It wasn’t a secret.

That didn’t mean Ronan was going to talk about it. He curled his lips into a sneer and looked down his nose at Parrish, making full use of the spare inch or two he had on the other boy. “Keep your scrawny ass out of my business.” It was not as pointed as he might have liked, but frankly he didn’t have much ammo on Parrish, who persisted in being irritatingly mysterious. “Gansey might think you hung the sun, but you’re not shit. Just another bored rich kid trying to cozy up to him.”

Parrish narrowed his eyes, straightening. This didn’t bring him up to Ronan’s height, but it was enough to signal that he wasn’t going to be pushed around. Despite Ronan’s annoyance, some part of him appreciated that.

“The world doesn’t revolve around you or Gansey,” he said. His words were picked with careful precision, but there was something there, something Ronan couldn’t quite put his finger on. “If you’re looking for a bored rich kid, find a mirror.”

And then it clicked. The way Parrish’s voice slid along the syllables. He spoke just like any well-bred Aglionby boy, except - not quite. Under the surface, barely there, was a twang that sounded familiar, that crept out when Parrish was worked up. Ronan thought he’d heard it before when he tried to get under Parrish’s skin, but it had never quite settled in his ears until now.

It didn’t matter, not really. It probably just meant that Parrish’s parents were Texas oil barons or some shit. But it did mean that, for whatever reason, Parrish was trying to hide his accent.

Maybe he didn’t want to get teased. Maybe he wanted to sound more sophisticated. Maybe he just hated accents.

Ronan wasn’t sure any of those things were true. He wanted to needle Parrish more, draw more out of him, see if he could put some pieces together.

But then the path ended, and everything changed.

It didn’t look obviously different. It was really just more forest, trees and grass and dark earth. But it _felt_ different, and they all knew it. Ronan didn’t know what the others were feeling, but their knowledge that this was different was written across their faces. To him it felt - almost familiar, somehow.

Gansey was kneeling next to a pond, his eyes alight with wonder, trailing his fingers through the water. He looked up as Ronan and Adam approached, pure delight in every inch of him.

“They change colors, Ronan,” he said, and Ronan leaned in to see that, yes, they did. The tiny fish flickered through the light, visible in the clear water, sliding from red to a vivid blue. Impossible.

But familiar. Like something his father might have dreamt, but he knew that couldn’t be the case. He watched Parrish, eyes wide, press his palm against the trunk of a tree as if to prove to himself it was real. It looked like a tree, felt like a tree, but somehow _more_. Somehow everything here felt like more.

The wind whispered through the branches, and it sounded like words.

Ronan was caught, wind in his ears, his eyes on Parrish, who looked different. Like he was seeing something he’d never believed possible, or hearing it, or feeling it. The familiarity of this place felt meaningless next to the light in Parrish’s eyes.

Parrish looked up, and met his gaze, and it was only then that Ronan turned away. A knot of confusion and anger filled him, even in this impossible place. But the trees whispered, and a warm breeze rushed through him, and for a moment his anger was gone.

He did not, however, forget the look on Adam’s face.

Later, after they’d stumbled back to the Pig, Noah was uncommonly quiet and Gansey was rapturous and Parrish was - Ronan wasn’t sure what Parrish was. He seemed uncertain in a way that Ronan didn’t understand. None of them had expected that place, not even Gansey who had been searching for years and who was now full of speeches about ley lines and magic and impossible things.

Ronan had always known there were impossible things, and Gansey had always believed.

But maybe, he thought, Parrish hadn’t. Maybe, until now, practical and serious Adam Parrish had not believed in magic, not until they’d found a hidden forest with color-changing fish and talking trees. And now he couldn’t deny it.

It had changed something about him, or maybe it had changed something about Ronan. He didn’t know. But whatever it was, he found it more and more difficult to tear his eyes from Adam’s long fingers where they rested on the car window.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam looks for Ronan.

When they met, they did it carefully. Off Aglionby campus, sometimes in the next town over, or at least somewhere Aglionby students never went.

It wasn’t required. No one should be able to recognize Mr. Gray’s face, and there should be nothing remarkable about Adam being seen with him. He was listed as Adam’s legal guardian in the school files, though of course under a different name. This distance was simply the both of them being extra careful.

The fewer obvious ties there were, the easier it would be if either one of them was caught out. If Adam messed up somehow and alerted the Lynches to his true agenda, or if Mr. Gray somehow made a mistake and got into some trouble, the fewer people who knew of their connection the safer the other would be. And though neither of those things were likely, they weren’t impossible. Greenmantle was nowhere near the only one looking for the Greywaren, though he was certainly the one with the best lead. Any of the others could send minions that would put Adam or Mr. Gray in danger - more likely Mr. Gray, since Adam was seemingly no more than a student.

So they were careful. Just in case.

To be utterly safe, they probably shouldn’t have met at all, but Adam didn’t think either of them wanted that. It would have been fine - he knew what he was doing and so did Mr. Gray, and they could communicate via phone and other methods they’d set up beforehand. But they’d both gotten used to each other over the months, and it was easier to talk in person.

Adam thought maybe it was also easier for them both to have a small period of time in which they didn’t have to pretend to be anything but what they were.

This time, they were meeting at a run-down sandwich shop at the edge of town. No Aglionby student would be caught dead here, and though Adam had been there once or twice in his previous life, he knew it wasn’t frequented by anyone who would recognize him. Safe enough.

“Trust will come slowly,” Mr. Gray said. “Your patience will be vital, here. We have the time. No one else has come close.”

Adam nodded. “This ley line might have something to do with it. Ronan looked surprised too, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know anything about it.”

He’d told Mr. Gray about the forest they’d found, the ley line. He’d read up on what he could find, listened to what Gansey had been saying. 

If he were being truthful, he hadn’t believed. Not really. Not until that forest. He knew what they were searching for, and that it supposedly had the ability to make impossible things, but Adam had not truly considered the possibility of magic until that moment. Now - now it was difficult to deny it.

“Is school going well otherwise?” Mr. Gray asked. Adam smiled, a quick twist of his lips.

“My grades are excellent.” His voice was dry, self-deprecating. His grades _were_ excellent, just as they’d always been before everything, and the classes were exactly what he’d imagined Aglionby classes would be like. They had the latest equipment and the most up-to-date textbooks, skilled teachers, more money than any school really needed. And of course, it was all wasted on the oblivious, careless rich boys.

Adam knew he should cultivate friendships. It could make things easier in the long run, having other Aglionby students he could get information and potentially help from. But it was difficult - difficult to relate to these boys and difficult to _want_ to. They were nothing like him, with their blindness to the realities of the world. He could see clearly how much he might have loathed them if he’d attended when he was supposed to, when he was still living in a trailer with a violent father and thirdhand sneakers. He loathed them a little now, when he was already part of a world most of them knew nothing about.

It had been easy to befriend Gansey - much easier than he’d expected. Gansey seemed like any of the Aglionby boys, like a product of blind privilege and too much money, but it had been almost immediately obvious that he was something more. 

Adam had, of course, known that he was Ronan’s friend and approached him for that reason - but he’d expected to tolerate Gansey as the easiest path to get closer to Ronan, who was notoriously uninterested in making friends. Instead, Gansey had charmed Adam with his bright curiosity and his eccentric interests, and Adam had realized quickly that he valued Gansey’s friendship for exactly what it was: friendship, rather than a path to his goal.

It had probably helped that Ronan was so aggressively unwelcoming.

Adam had expected that, reading Ronan’s file. But experiencing it was something else, and something that frayed at his temper more than he’d anticipated. Ronan Lynch seemed uniquely capable of getting under his skin, which was something that Adam had worked very hard to make difficult in the months since he’d been with Mr. Gray. 

He was observant and clever, but he couldn’t read Ronan, not yet. He thought Ronan hated him at first, and Adam had struggled with what was the more expedient path - pretending to be someone Ronan would like - and what he wanted, which was simply to do things his own way. In the end, Adam’s stubbornness had required the second.

Of course, he also hadn’t been sure what kind of person Ronan would like. Someone like Gansey, charismatic and generous? Someone like Joseph Kavinsky, edgy and dangerous? But Adam didn’t like the idea of pretending to be someone else for as long as this would take.

He’d done it before, but only on shorter trips. A day or two, a week at most, acting like a different kind of boy to get information or trust. But this - this was a long game. Adam didn’t want to keep something like that up for so long, it made slips much more likely.

And it just felt wrong.

So he acted like himself, and because of that they didn’t always get along. But Adam wasn’t sure anyone would be able to get along all the time, and he thought maybe - maybe Ronan was starting to grow used to him. Maybe even to like him a little.

The week before, Ronan had taken him for a drive when Gansey had been busy with a family function. They hadn’t talked, instead just driving much faster than was safe and watching the world pass by. Maybe it had been a test, or maybe Ronan had just wanted company. Either way, Adam had… well, he’d enjoyed it, after he stopped being sure they were going to die in a fiery car crash.

Ronan Lynch was an odd creature. Adam should hate him for being the worst sort of wasteful rich boy, consumed with his own issues and without a care in the world for anyone around him. But for all that Ronan was deliberately difficult and often annoying, Adam found him somehow magnetic as well. 

Maybe it was the secrets Adam was sure he had. The scars on his wrist, the trouble sleeping, the BMW that used to be his father’s. Adam had read his file. The hospital visit was in there, Niall Lynch’s will, anything of note, but those were just words. There was something behind them - of course there was. That was why Adam was here at all. 

At first, he hadn’t been sure, he’d thought maybe there really wasn’t anything more to Ronan Lynch than an angry boy trying to work through his grief. That maybe Declan would have been a better choice, surely having more information. But more and more, Ronan felt like something else, something more than the image he so carefully cultivated.

Or maybe, Adam thought with some exasperation, he was just developing a ridiculous crush. Ronan was attractive, like a knife or a viper or a snarling panther, something dangerous that you still had a hard time keeping your eyes off of. He wouldn’t let that affect him - he told himself that - but he couldn’t _ignore_ it either.

Adam had never admitted his attraction to men while he was living in his father’s house. That would have been a death sentence, and anyway, he’d never even had the time to date girls - carrying on a far more dangerous relationship with a boy was not even a possibility. But Mr. Gray didn’t care, that was clear, and so Adam had allowed himself to accept that he could find boys just as attractive as girls. He still hadn’t really had any reason to act on it, not with the way they moved around, but he’d shared a few kisses with a few different people. Nothing that meant anything. But it made it possible for him to look at Ronan, accept that he was attracted to the other boy, and then ignore it.

Well. Mostly ignore it. Some days were harder than others.

Still, with Gansey and Ronan so interesting and unique and _different_ than the other Aglionby boys, Adam found it incredibly difficult to want to make friends with any of them. He had a roommate, a tanned blonde boy from Massachusetts who spent most of his time with the polo team. They had nothing in common, nothing to talk about. They ignored each other, mostly, though with the distant politeness of people who also had nothing against one another.

That’s how it was with most of the Aglionby students, save people like Tad Carruthers (who always seemed to find the most privileged possible thing to say, and seemed to think Adam would like him more because of it) and Joseph Kavinsky (who was careful to make his disinterest in Adam clear, which was entertaining only because the simple of act doing that made it clear that he _was_ interested, likely solely because of Adam’s proximity to Ronan and Gansey).

Besides Gansey and Ronan, no one was worth getting to know. Except Noah, who was so very easy to forget about. When he was there, he was a quiet but friendly presence - when he wasn’t there, Adam hardly thought about him. It might have seemed unfair and even a little mean, if he’d thought about it, but he didn’t.

He hadn’t even mentioned him to Mr. Gray, which should have seemed strange but instead just ended up being something he didn’t quite realize. Not until later, not until he knew why.

On that day, though, they talked about Ronan and Gansey, and a little about the other Lynch brothers. They talked about school, and about Mr Gray’s activities - since Adam had texted him about the ley line, he’d started looking into that more, and was currently on his way to visit a local family of psychics that he thought might know something.

But mostly, they just allowed themselves to, for a few moments, be nothing besides what they were. A hitman and his - what? Protege? Adam supposed that word worked better than anything else.

It was relaxing. It was necessary. And then they agreed on the course of their mission for the next couple weeks, until they were able to meet again (continue as you have been, learn what you can) and they parted.

Adam returned to Aglionby and his student life, a normal teenage boy again, save for the magical ley line, the hitman’s number in his phone, and the gun stashed in the back of his dresser, just in case.

He spent the day studying. They had plans for the weekend, him and Ronan and Gansey, but it was only Wednesday, and he had grades to keep up. Never mind that they weren’t real, never mind that they might not technically matter, they mattered to him. That sort of thing always would.

It was late that night when he got the text.

_Adam? Ronan is missing. Have you seen him?_

Gansey’s concern came through as clear as day, despite the shortness of the text. Adam would not have thought it particularly alarming, Ronan going missing, except that Gansey clearly did. Adam’s understanding was that Ronan often went off on his own to street race or drink or get into fistfights, and any short disappearance was likely to be attributed to those things. He’d make his way home, a little worse for wear but otherwise fine. Gansey had complained occasionally about Ronan’s late nights, the days he missed at school because of them.

So this had to be something else. There was something about this time that made it different, that made Gansey worried. Adam didn’t know what it was and didn’t want to ask, but the fact that Gansey was texting him about it at all was enough of a clue.

He never had before. Adam didn’t know if that meant this time Gansey had more to worry about, or if it meant that he’d been taken further into their confidences, enough to be drawn in when Ronan was potentially in danger.

He didn’t have time to think about how that made him feel.

He texted back. _No, but I’ll look._

There wasn’t anywhere he could think of to check that Gansey wouldn’t have already considered, but with two of them the places around town where Ronan might be found could be covered more easily. He slipped out of his room without an explanation to his roommate, who didn’t seem to care anyway.

It was extremely unlikely that Ronan Lynch would be found on Aglionby’s campus, but Adam checked all the possible places anyway. The bench outside by the tree where they sometimes ate lunch, the Latin classroom, Matthew Lynch’s dorm, the back staircase where Kavinsky and his stooges liked to smoke. All empty, and Adam had to be careful in the dark to keep from running into anyone with authority. The students of Aglionby were all rich and privileged enough that they weren’t subject to too much nannying, but there were still rules about curfew that were usually quietly ignored. If Adam ran straight into someone, though, there would be no ignoring it.

He did not find Ronan. It would have been more shocking if he had. Ronan was practically allergic to the Aglionby campus.

So Adam got his bike.

It had been a careful discussion when he’d come to Aglionby. Not all Aglionby students had cars, but many of them did, and nearly all were nice cars. Mr. Gray had suggested renting or leasing, but neither option was very feasible, and either could get difficult fast. Buying or going without were the only two real options, and Adam’s natural frugality had made the decision for them. He could carry on the illusion of belonging there without a car - it wasn’t difficult, particularly with a few dropped references to nice cars that belonged to him but, sadly, were not at Aglionby.

Adam’s knowledge of cars was more than sufficient for that task. And a bike was easier to get rid of, plus the necessity of catching the occasional ride with Gansey or Ronan had helped them grow closer quickly. It just made sense.

It was also possible that - though Adam could drive - it wasn’t something they’d focused his training on. He was not yet always entirely comfortable behind the wheel, and still found more comfort under the hood. That would have to change someday, he knew, but right now there wasn’t time for it.

So, a bike. A nice one, not the rusted secondhand thing he used to ride. Something the bicyclists of campus (of which there were a few) admired. It worked well enough, though in this moment Adam could wish for something faster. Something that could cover more ground.

He had a list of locations in his mind, a list that had Ronan written all over it. He texted Gansey again.

_Not on campus. I’ll check in town._

Gansey replied almost instantly.

_I’ll start on the far side. The streets he likes to race on._

It was carelessly thoughtful, Gansey aware that Adam’s search radius was far less than his. It left the closer side of town for Adam.

He swallowed down his discomfort and headed into Henrietta.

He almost never went there alone. Only when meeting Mr. Gray, and their meeting places were carefully chosen. The rest of the time, Adam ventured into town only with other Aglionby boys - Ronan and Gansey usually, sometimes a couple others if he was just running an errand, picking up extra body wash or toilet paper or snacks.

It was camouflage. His part of town - what Adam still thought of as his part of town, old trailers and rusted-out cars and fathers who drank too much - didn’t mingle with Aglionby students. They didn’t go to the same restaurants, didn’t visit the same stores, and even if they did how could they pick out Adam Parrish from the rest? Adam Parrish, with a nice haircut and a clean uniform and not one single bruise marring his tanned skin. Adam Parrish, who smiled and looked authority figures in the eye.

Adam Parrish, who still sometimes flinched when someone moved too fast. Who still froze when adult men raised their voices in anger. He was better at hiding it now, better at acting normal, and everyone had nightmares. It was easy to make excuses for those, too.

As long as he stayed comfortably in Aglionby camouflage, it was unlikely anyone from his part of town would see him, or recognize him if they did. It hadn’t happened yet. It wasn’t likely to happen now.

He still hated going into town alone.

He kept his head down as he pedaled, shoulders tense every time a car passed. But no one slowed, no one shouted his name. It was late, the streetlights the only light left. He would be fine.

He would be even more fine if he stuck to places his father would never step foot in. That’s how he ended up at St. Agnes.

It was near Monmouth, so Adam couldn’t be sure that Gansey hadn’t already checked there. But it was also not too far from Aglionby - and very far from anywhere Adam might run into someone he’d known. He would try more dangerous places, but he needed to start carefully.

But in the end, of course, it wasn’t necessary. Ronan was there.

The church was open at all hours, presumably for anyone consumed by guilt or the love of God in the middle of the night. The door swung open when Adam pushed it, and he lingered in the doorway for a moment, unsure of what he would say if there were a priest waiting inside. He’d never really been to church.

There wasn’t. At first, he didn’t see Ronan either.

Then there was movement from among the pews. Adam stepped closer, uncertain, and caught sight of Ronan.

He was slung across the pew, half laying down. His leather jacket and ripped jeans stood out against the polished wood, and Adam wondered briefly, insanely, if Ronan went to church looking like that. Surely he wore a suit, but Adam had never seen such a thing, could barely imagine it.

He walked closer, down the aisle. The church was silent and it felt as if saying something or making any noise at all would shatter the moment, the serenity of it.

Adam stopped at the end of the pew and looked at Ronan. Ronan’s eyes were closed, his dark lashes a shadow against his skin, his cheekbones looking sharp enough to cut. Adam had heard that most people were more vulnerable when they slept, when their masks fell away, but Ronan looked just as dangerous. 

He really was incredibly attractive. Adam hated it a little.

“What are you staring at?” Ronan said. He hadn’t been asleep. Adam felt caught out.

“You,” he said, not sure what to do except be honest. Ronan’s lips curled into a smirk as his eyes opened, deep blue, keen as a knife.

“You’re a fucking creep, Parrish,” he said. His words were slurred, and now that Adam was closer he could smell alcohol. It was familiar, and it turned his stomach a little. 

“I’m not the one who disappeared. Gansey’s freaking out.”

“Guess I forgot to leave Mom a note,” Ronan drawled. He hadn’t sat up yet. His hands were curled around something, but Adam couldn’t see what it was. Not big enough to be a bottle, that’s for sure, and there were none laying around. Whatever Ronan had drunk, he’d done it before he came to church. That was something.

Adam retrieved his phone from his pocket and typed out a quick text to Gansey, telling him where they were. “He was worried.”

Ronan dragged himself upright, and after a moment’s hesitation Adam slipped into the pew, sitting next to him. He wasn’t sure why. It just seemed right.

“He’s always worried. He even got you out here. But Gansey doesn’t have shit to worry about. I’m fine.” Ronan didn’t sound angry. He sounded amused, drunk, disconnected. Adam felt a brief surge of aimless anger, that it could be so easy for some people, that Ronan could drink without descending into violence. Ronan, who was a walking poster child for pointless violence.

“He was worried about this,” Adam said, and he reached out, and he slid his fingers below the leather wristbands Ronan always wore, the ones he chewed on when he was bored or frustrated, the ones he never took off. Adam’s fingers brushed the scar tissue there. He felt Ronan stiffen.

It was going too far. They weren’t that close. Ronan didn’t trust him that much. Adam knew all of that, but still he did it. Later he would wonder what he was thinking - he could have ruined everything. In that moment, he wasn’t thinking at all.

Ronan could have lashed out, could have yelled, could have caught Adam with a right hook without even trying. Instead, he didn’t move. He let Adam trace the scar on his wrist. He said nothing.

Then he opened his hands. There was a baby bird there.

Adam stared.

“I’m gonna call her Chainsaw,” Ronan said, and it was so unexpected that Adam had no reply. The bird, tiny and featherless and remarkably ugly, peeped.

“I think she’s hungry,” Adam said, because there was nothing else to say. His fingers fell away from Ronan’s arm. He had a lot of questions, and not all of them were about the bird.

Ronan, impossible creature that he was, smiled.

Behind them, the church door swung open. Gansey was there.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shit gets real.

Things got weird, slowly but surely and then all at once.

Ronan supposed that, really, they’d been weird all along. He could take things out of his dreams, they’d found a weird magical forest. Gansey was obsessed with a centuries-old dead king and Parrish wasn’t what he seemed. Ronan wasn’t sure what he was - just that he was more than he pretended to be. So really, they’d all of them been weird all along, and maybe the whole world.

But it felt different when things were actively getting weirder.

The forest was the first thing. They went back, Gansey utterly taken with it, and weren’t they all? Even Parrish lit up a bit in the woods, the cautious set of his shoulders melting away. Ronan watched him sometimes, because he couldn’t help himself. And sometimes it seemed like the trees were whispering to them - but so far no one had been able to make out what those whispers said.

Ronan thought that might be a good thing, but he didn’t say so aloud. Gansey was, of course, delighted by the mystery of the whispering trees (Ronan privately deciding that would be a great title for a Nancy Drew novel) and very much wanted to figure out what was going on.

Ronan didn’t really. Part of him wasn’t sure he’d like the answer, and part of him felt - like his dreams - that there might be no answer at all. It might just be.

But anyway. Talking trees, a forest that changed around them. Noah disappearing more often. Gansey falling deeper into his obsession. And Parrish -

He couldn’t figure out Parrish.

He was a part of their group now, and there wasn’t anything Ronan could do about that, and the even more uncomfortable part was that he wasn’t sure there was anything he wanted to do about it. Parrish wasn’t so awful to have around - he was smart and observant, he was less overbearing than Gansey at his worst and sometimes he smiled at the things Ronan said. Sometimes he even laughed.

That was distracting.

But Ronan was observant too, more than most people expected him to be. He’d noticed that Parrish was uncomfortable in town, that he didn’t talk much about his life before Aglionby, that he somehow seemed more… _something_. More than the other students. More mature or more aware or maybe, simply, different.

The problem was that even now Ronan couldn’t put all the pieces in order. He was missing big chunks of the mystery of Adam Parrish, and he didn’t know if it was important to solve or not. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe Parrish was just a boy who had an estranged relationship with rich and worldly parents, a boy who’d had to learn how to take care of himself.

Because that much Ronan knew must be true. Parrish was careful with money, not careless the way Ronan and Gansey often were, even though he wasn’t remotely in danger of running out. He was studious, even though grades didn’t mean shit. He took care of his belongings, though Ronan knew he could buy replacements easily.

Ronan hadn’t meant to spend so much time observing Parrish. It had just happened, and somewhere along it way it had eased from suspicion into something else, something Ronan didn’t exactly have words for. 

Or maybe he just didn’t want to put words to it. Maybe he wasn’t ready for that.

Parrish had been folded into their group seamlessly, it felt like. Gansey didn’t even bother issuing an individual invitation anymore, instead simply assuming that if he talked about going to the forest, Parrish would come along. Ronan accepted this with bad grace at first, but that had eased into something else too. Now, when Parrish didn’t come along with them, he felt the absence.

Sometimes, they even spent time together without Gansey. A few late night drives, when Ronan was antsy and aimless and needed to move. A few hours spent in the library, when Parrish tried to help him write an essay. Some evenings at Monmouth, where Adam fed Chainsaw carefully, a mildly disgusted expression on his face.

He looked at Ronan, sometimes, and Ronan wasn’t sure what the look in his eyes meant. It was as if, while Ronan was trying to solve the puzzle of Parrish, Parrish was trying equally hard to solve the puzzle of him.

Ronan thought about that night in the church sometimes, when he’d pulled Chainsaw from his dreams. When Adam had found him, when his long fingers had slid over Ronan’s scars.

He should have been angry then, but he hadn’t been, and he couldn’t find it in himself to be angry now. Just confused. He didn’t know what it had meant.

Chainsaw grew, bit by bit. The end of the school year got closer, bit by bit.

Things got weirder, bit by bit.

Then things got very weird, very fast. First, Noah’s bones, found on the ley line. The revelation that their friend, _Ronan’s_ friend, was dead. Had been dead all along. Had been murdered.

Even Adam had gone white with shock, Adam who seemed so unflappable.

Ronan had been awful for days afterwards, and he knew it. Drinking and racing and fighting and trying to find some way to cope, some way to deal with the reality of death. The dreams where he saw his father’s body with Noah’s face, Noah’s bones with his father’s wedding ring, death and death and more death.

He only brought bones out once. 

That day was the worst. He skipped school and left Monmouth, unable to deal with any trace of Noah - especially because there _wasn’t_ any trace of Noah. His room was as if no one had ever lived in it, because no one had. He was still there, but now Ronan could see, if he wanted to, that he wasn’t real.

He didn’t want to. He left.

It was the middle of the day. There was no one to race - even Kavinsky went to school sometimes, how else would he keep his pharmaceutical business running? That was where all the wealthy customers were.

Ronan didn’t want to see his face anyway. He just wanted - something. He wanted it all to go away, he wanted Noah to be alive, he wanted his father to be alive.

Adam found him at a gas station, completely by accident. He was buying a bottle of water - it was a hot day out, the beginnings of summer creeping into the world bit by bit. Ronan was buying beer. His ID was perfect, of course, as perfect as a dream.

“Skipping class?” Ronan said with a sneer. He didn’t know why. He wasn’t unhappy to see Adam. These days, he would never call what he felt when he saw Adam _unhappiness_. He didn’t know what he would call it.

Adam ignored his curled lip and slid a crumpled dollar bill across the counter, then dug out some change. He counted it out like it mattered, which of course it didn’t. Any Aglionby student could buy out half the snacks in that shitty gas station without a blink.

But Adam was strange like that. He uncapped the water and took a long drink, a drop sliding down his chin, the slim pillar of his neck. Ronan couldn’t look away, not until Adam moved again. He turned away violently then, projecting his disinterest and irritation for the world to see.

“I had an appointment,” Adam said. “At the dentist.”

He lied well and easily. It should have been believable, but Ronan didn’t believe it. He didn’t have a reason - he just didn’t. But he couldn’t exactly call Adam on it, so he scoffed instead. Whatever Adam was doing outside of Aglionby in the middle of the day, it was none of his business.

Adam slid the cap back on the bottle of water and stuck it in his bag. “Where are you going?”

Ronan didn’t have an answer for that. He didn’t know. “Put your shitty bike in the back. I’ll give you a ride.” He had thought he wanted to be alone, but with Adam right there, he wasn’t sure anymore.

They went out to the BMW and he helped Adam load his fancy bike into the back. Once they were inside the car, Chainsaw flapped onto the passenger side dashboard, peering at Adam. He rummaged through his bag and found a granola bar, unwrapping it and breaking it into bits to offer to her.

“Don’t feed my bird crap, Parrish,” Ronan said.

“It’s a granola bar,” Adam said. “Yesterday you fed her half a gummy worm.”

Since this was true, Ronan said nothing. He drove. Maybe, in the end, he had needed something else to focus on, because Adam’s presence calmed the whirl of his thoughts, the death and loss and anger of it all. Or maybe it was just that Adam made him think of other things entirely - the slow slide of that drop of water down his tanned skin, the gentleness of his fingers as he stroked Chainsaw’s feathers.

Dumb shit, basically.

He pressed his foot down on the accelerator, the smooth roar of the engine sinking into his bones. Adam’s eyes flickered to him - he saw it in the reflection on the windshield - but he didn’t mention the speed.

“You never told me where you found her.”

Of course he hadn’t. Because secrets only remained secrets if you didn’t tell anybody, and things might be getting weird - ley lines, magical forests, ghost friends - but taking things out of dreams was on another level.

Besides, he didn’t know how to explain.

“You’re right, Parrish,” he said with calm arrogance. “I didn’t.”

Adam let out a soft, annoyed huff of breath. Ronan had heard it before, usually directed at him, and he liked it. Most of the time.

Not so much today, even though he’d wanted to annoy Adam. It got under his skin, like everything seemed to get under his skin, like the absence of something. Adam’s presence, which had been a distraction, maybe even a comfort at first, and was slowly becoming something else. That and the general, worldwide absence of a living Noah were curdling into some mass of poison, something that made Ronan want to drive faster and split his knuckles open on something and drink until he couldn’t see.

“Pull over here,” Adam said, and Ronan did even though it was out of nowhere, obeying without a thought. Probably because he wasn’t having much luck thinking.

They were in front of the dollar store. Ronan’s brow wrinkled. It was a popular stop for Aglionby students who wanted to laugh at the depths to which those below them could sink. Who could imagine the sort of person who’d buy their silverware at a dollar store, after all? Or their food? But Adam had never shown the least bit of interest in that.

“Slumming, Parrish?”

Adam didn’t laugh. His shoulders tensed for a moment and Ronan thought he might be angry, but then he slid out of the BMW. “I’ll be right back.”

Ronan had no idea what was going on, so he just let it happen. His anger, his tension, none of it was gone. He felt like water about to boil, and now he was regretting giving Adam a ride. He was going to explode sooner or later, and it was probably going to be at Adam.

A few weeks ago he would have embraced that. Now, there was a bitter taste in his mouth. Things had changed.

He wanted Adam to like him, which was fucking idiotic. But true.

Adam slid back into the car, a bag in his hands. Ronan couldn’t see what was in it.

“Head out of town,” Adam said, and Ronan started driving again. His curiosity was getting the better of him now - not wiping away his inner turmoil, but giving him something else to focus on, the way Adam’s presence had. It wouldn’t last.

He followed Adam’s directions, except the ones that reminded him there was a speed limit, because Ronan did not believe in speed limits. When he stopped the car, it was on a back road somewhere outside Henrietta, somewhere Ronan had never been. They were on the edge of what looked like an abandoned quarry.

They got out of the car - or Adam did, and Ronan followed. He wondered for a moment how Adam had known about this place, and why they were here, and then Adam pulled something from his bag and shoved it into Ronan’s hands.

It was a snow globe. One of the shitty ones that Noah liked, that he’d picked up a few times from the same dollar store. The bag was full of them.

For one moment, Ronan felt - weirdly _known_ , as if Adam had understood something about him that he hadn’t even figured out himself. He met Adam’s eyes, blue the same shade as the flowers his mother had grown on the edges of her garden. What were they? Periwinkles? He couldn’t remember anymore, and felt a sharp stab of grief - for his mother, for his father, for Noah.

He turned and hurled the snow globe into the quarry, watching it shatter against the rocks. Something inside him unraveled.

Adam pressed another into his hand, and he threw that one, too.

It was wanton destruction, senseless and wasteful, and Ronan didn’t know why Adam - always so careful and prudent, even if he didn’t need to be - was allowing it. Encouraging it. Had spent money on cheaply-made trash just for Ronan to destroy it. He didn’t know why, but fuck, it helped. It wasn’t anger, it wasn’t even a tribute, it was just - release.

Grief.

Adam smashed a couple himself before the bag was empty, though Ronan was sure he didn’t get the same satisfaction out of it. Adam Parrish seemed like the sort to grieve in another way, and anyway he hadn’t known Noah so long, hadn’t loved him so much.

But he’d given Ronan this, and it helped.

They didn’t talk again. Ronan drove Adam back to campus, then went back to Monmouth himself, and grieved, and slept until the sun went down.

Noah’s death wasn’t something he got over, not really. Not even after that. It was something he accepted, something he had to accept. Death couldn’t be fought, couldn’t be argued with. He should have known somehow. They all should have. But he was able to get to a place where the anger over his own grief was no longer on the verge of consuming him.

It never got as bad as it had with his father. Nothing ever would. But they were connected, and some days Ronan knew he had never really stopped grieving. It got easier, but it didn’t go away. He went back to school, they went back to what they’d been doing, life went back to - almost - normal. Ghostly Noah, kingly Gansey, mysterious Adam.

And then their Latin teacher overheard them talking about the forest - the ley lines - and things got even stranger. But maybe that was inevitable, too.

Ronan didn’t realize that was what had happened, not at first. None of them did. Gansey wasn’t quiet about his search for Glendower or his interest in magic or his research, and most people - especially adults - treated it as charmingly odd but completely harmless. An eccentric hobby for a boy who could afford to be eccentric.

Ronan had never liked Whelk, but as he disliked all teachers on principle, he hadn’t considered that there might be anything abnormal about his instinctive distrust. He hadn’t considered that they should be careful, that he would take Gansey’s hobbies and discoveries more seriously than most.

Not until he tried to kidnap Gansey.

They only found out about it after it was all over, of course. After Gansey had escaped, after he discovered Whelk was Noah’s murderer, after he was safe again.

Which was good, because Ronan could only take so much bullshit in such a short span of time. He wanted to find Whelk, beat his skull in like he’d done to Noah, make him pay for all that he’d done to Gansey. But no one knew where he was, he’d run off after everything had gone down and was now missing in action. And they were back at Monmouth, and Gansey was preaching caution.

It made sense. It wasn’t what Ronan would choose, of course, but what choice did they have? 

Adam disagreed.

“What do you think he’ll do now, Gansey?” Adam said. “He isn’t going to stop. He didn’t get what he wanted from you, don’t you think he’s just going to try again? We have to stop him.”

“And how will we stop him? Bring the police to him, with no evidence to prove that he killed Noah, only a story about a ley line?” Gansey said. He was in fine form, looking at Adam as if he was disappointed in him. Ronan knew how that felt.

He stayed out of it.

“We’ll stop him ourselves,” Adam said, and his voice was even. Level, as if this was the only obvious choice. But maybe to him it was - there were three of them, after all, and only one of Whelk. But he was desperate, and armed, and very clearly capable of murder.

“We don’t even know where he’s gone,” Gansey said.

“Of course we do,” Adam said, and there was something almost like anger in his voice now. “The ley line. He’s going to try to wake it - he’s going to claim its power. Just like he tried to before.”

Just like he tried to do with Noah.

For a long moment, silence lay between them.

“We can stop him,” Adam said, finally.

“You’ll have to make a decision,” Noah said, looking at Adam. He hadn’t been there a moment ago. Or maybe he had been, and Ronan just hadn’t noticed.

Adam pressed his lips together. He looked at Ronan, a quick glance that Ronan could not divine the meaning of, and then at Gansey. “Go with me, or not. But I’m going.”

It was an empty threat. On his bike, how could Adam get to the forest in any reasonable timeframe? But empty or not, it had weight, and Ronan watched Gansey press his fingers to his temple and give in. It was rare, but not impossible, and he supposed if anyone could sway Gansey’s decision, it would be Adam.

They piled into the Pig. At Adam’s request, they stopped by Aglionby, just long enough for Adam to retrieve something from his dorm room. Then they headed to the forest.

From the front passenger seat, Ronan watched Adam in the mirror. He was on his phone, tapping out texts quickly and efficiently. Noah was next to him and leaned over, peering at the phone, for all appearances a normal boy again.

“Who’s that?” Noah said.

“Someone who can help us,” Adam said. “He’s going to meet us there.”

Neither Gansey nor Ronan asked any further questions. Gansey was focused on driving, his brow furrowed, his shoulders tense. Ronan wasn’t even sure he’d heard Adam. Ronan, for his part, wouldn’t even know what to ask.

There was more to Adam. There had always been more. The revelation that he had some sort of friend or ally who could help them in a situation like this was - well. It fit, somehow. But even so, Ronan didn’t know what to think about any of this. About ghostly Noah, Whelk who wanted power, Adam who was finally letting some of his secrets free.

Part of Ronan just wanted to go back to fucking around on Gansey’s stupid hiking trips. Finding dumb ways to spend their free time, distracting Adam from studying, getting into trouble with Noah. Not this, not something that felt suddenly, eerily real.

The rest of him knew that this was probably inevitable. The forest hadn’t happened to them, they’d searched for it - a ghost, a boy who pulled things from his dreams, a boy who’d died once. Whatever Adam was. This was always coming for them, in some form.

They made it to the forest, piled out of the Pig. Adam’s friend wasn’t there yet.

The rest of the night, when Ronan remembered it, came in fits and starts. Nothing felt solid, except the things that were more real than reality.

The forest was wild, magical, different. Alive in a way that was undeniable. They found a car, Noah’s Mustang, and Ronan thought he might punch out a window in the wave of rage and pain that followed, but instead his hands only inscribed words on the dust. They went further, into the trees, to the ley line. What must have been the ley line. To Whelk.

And he was ready, with a gun and a rapidly disintegrating mental state. Waiting for them, because he needed a sacrifice. And it would have gone bad - that circle, that altar, that gun.

Except that Adam also had a gun. He pulled it from his backpack, and Ronan realized that must have been what they stopped at Aglionby for. That Adam had had it all this time. He held it with an ease that spoke of familiarity, but there was a tension in his shoulders, a spark of fear in his eyes.

Gansey gasped when he saw it. “Where did you get that, Adam?” he said, but Adam didn’t answer. To Ronan it was obvious. This was another hidden side of Adam Parrish, another piece clicking into place.

But Whelk didn’t see it. He saw three schoolboys trying to face him down, and the only one with a weapon was the studious, slim, quiet one. Not a threat, even with a gun.

“You have to be joking,” he said, the disgust clear in his voice. “A soft rich kid stealing daddy’s gun and thinking that makes him tough? Put it down and leave. I’ll let you go. I only need one of you. There only needs to be one sacrifice.”

He raised the gun and pointed it at Gansey. There was a moment when Ronan tensed, not knowing what he was doing, ready to throw himself in the way, all unthinking. But Whelk hesitated.

Whelk hesitated, just for a second. He’d killed before, he could do it again, but it wasn’t easy for him. He hesitated. Adam didn’t.

Ronan wasn’t watching Adam when he pulled the trigger. He heard the gunshot, saw the impact, saw Whelk’s shock and the fear that came over him a moment later, the fear of death. It was only after that that he looked at Adam and saw his white face, his wide eyes, the way he was absolutely stock-still. _He’s never done this before_ , Ronan thought, wildly, and then shit got weird.

“The sacrifice,” Gansey said. “Adam!”

The forest seemed to move around them, the earth rising up, the sky lowering. It was loud, but Ronan didn’t know what he was hearing - or maybe it just felt loud. It felt like everything shook, like an earthquake, but not a leaf fell. It felt like an eternity.

Adam’s eyes rolled back in his head and he crumpled to the ground. There was nothing to break his fall, but he settled to the grass as if it was welcoming him, cradling him, accepting him softly. For a moment Ronan was frozen. Then he ran to Adam, Gansey with him.

Adam was still breathing. There was that, at least.

“What the fuck,” Ronan said.

“He woke the ley line,” Gansey said. “Just like Whelk was trying to do.” Gansey’s voice was thin and strained. They’d just seen a man die. They’d just seen their friend do it.

Whelk’s body lay in the grass only a few feet away. Adam lay at their feet.

“I’m late,” a steady voice said. Ronan turned to see a man - older, nondescript in a careful way, with sharp eyes and measured movements. The man looked at them, and Ronan could not see what he was thinking, but when he looked at Adam his mouth tightened for the briefest of moments.

“You’re Adam’s friend,” Ronan said, but friend didn’t seem like the right word anymore. Ronan instantly distrusted him.

“Mr. Gray,” the man said. “Let’s get Adam back to somewhere he can rest. Then you can tell me what happened.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam has a rough day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, Blue is in this. She'll be in the next chapter, although there have been references to Fox Way sprinkled through the fic so far so this shouldn't be a surprise. (I write a few chapters ahead so I can edit a little more effectively, so like... just trust me. I'm not totally making things up as I go along, I promise.)
> 
> Also, I'm going to write some things for Pynch Week so it might be a bit longer before the next update. Thanks for reading!

This was the closest that the Gray Man had been to any of Niall Lynch’s children.

He’d seen them from a distance. He’d done his research. But it had made more sense to have Adam get close to them, to try to tease out the information rather than using violence - which is surely what he would have done if Adam had not been in the picture.

But because of Adam, he hadn’t needed to approach them. He’d let Adam do his work while pursuing his own leads, both inside Henrietta and not. An initial search of the Barns had yielded a number of incredible, impossible things, but none of them capable of creating more of those things. None of them the Greywaren.

And then, before he could turn up more leads, Adam had brought news of the ley line and the forest on it. That changed things. The mission itself was the same, but there were more variables. He’d trusted Adam to do what need to be done, believed that he was coming closer to an answer, whether through Ronan Lynch or the ley line itself. He hadn’t needed to approach the Lynch brothers. He’d followed different leads, even left town a couple times to take care of other jobs.

And now this. It was only lucky that he’d been in Henrietta when Adam texted.

Or maybe that would have made no difference. He hadn’t been there, after all. He had not held the gun, he had not even been next to Adam while Adam took his first life.

It was strange, how that bothered him.

The Gray Man did not know what to make of this. They’d gone back to the factory that Lynch and Gansey lived in. Adam had seemed - strange. Distant. Out if it, really. From Richard Gansey III had poured a convoluted tale of magic and ley lines and murder, starring Barrington Whelk, and it was lucky for him that the Gray Man already knew most of the story, because Gansey was too distressed to keep it in any sort of decent order.

Adam had told him. Adam had not kept any facts from him, though the Gray Man knew that didn’t mean there weren’t secrets. Facts didn’t carry emotions, after all. Facts didn’t convey the shock in Gansey’s eyes at watching his friend kill someone. Facts didn’t transmit the tension of Ronan Lynch’s shoulders as he followed Adam and Gansey into the factory. 

A text that read _I think we’re becoming friends_ didn’t hold the ring of truth that these actions did: Gansey, cautious pressing a glass of water into Adam’s hand. Ronan, fists clenched, closing the door quietly so Adam wouldn’t start.

The Gray Man noticed. He hadn’t observed Adam with these boys before, but he could now. They cared for him. He noted this, set it aside, and focused on Adam instead. The Lynch boy needed more attention, but now wasn’t the time.

Adam sat on a couch, glass of water in his hands, miles of distance in his eyes. It could have been because he’d just killed a man for the first time, but the Gray Man did not think that was all. Adam had seen death before, even if he’d never dealt it. This was something more. The ley line, if Gansey was correct.

He sat down on the sofa next to Adam. Adam looked at him, with that steady careful gaze of his.

“I’m fine,” he said, but then his gaze flickered away, just for an instant.

“Don’t lie,” the Gray Man said. His voice was firm but quiet. Gentleness was not exactly a quality he possessed, but though Adam Parrish was not and would never be his son, he was the closest thing the Gray Man would ever have to such a thing. He would not put himself into the role that Adam’s father had, once upon a time. He never had yet, though he wore violence like an old jacket.

“I feel the same,” Adam said, but his fingers slid on the glass and he nearly dropped it. He corrected himself. “I can’t tell what’s different.”

But something was. They all knew. These boys who had spent the last weeks learning Adam, if not all his secrets, and the Gray Man who had taught him all those secrets.

“Who the fuck are you, anyway?” Ronan Lynch said. He was the sort of boy who would snarl and posture and fight, especially when he was confused or frightened, which was the case right now. Frightened for or of Adam, the Gray Man couldn’t be sure.

He did not answer the question. “There might be someone who can help.” Though the Gray Man was not intimately familiar with magic, he believed in it. He had to, now. And if Adam was connected to the ley line, had woken it, held its power in his hands - they needed to figure out what to do with that. What it meant for Adam, and for their mission. The Lynch boy was secondary to that.

When Adam had told him about the ley line, the Gray Man had done his research. He’d learned of a number of strange things around Henrietta attributed to the ley line over the years. He’d also learned of a house of supposed psychics in the town. He’d set the information aside, something to pursue later if necessary.

It was possible they were frauds. It was also possible that they were not. If the second thing was true, they were the best chance for Adam to learn something about this power he had awoken.

“I’ll contact you,” he said to Adam, though it was unnecessary to say it aloud. Still, Adam looked a little less lost, and the Gray Man was comforted by this.

He wasn’t sure about leaving Adam with only these boys - especially Lynch. It was less a concern for Adam’s safety and more the knowledge that Adam was vulnerable, that whatever was happening to him was setting him off balance. He wanted to stay, too, to talk Adam through what he had done.

But he couldn’t.

Instead, he placed a hand on Adam’s shoulder and squeezed gently, once. Then he left.

***

Adam could feel the ley line now. When he closed his eyes it was there, a vein of power that was at his fingertips. He felt like he could reach out and touch it, like he could wrap his hands around that power and mold it into whatever he needed it to be.

But it was thin in some areas, sputtering. Strong in others, too strong, like if he touched it it might burn him. He didn’t know what that meant. He didn’t know what any of this meant.

He couldn’t claim that he’d done it without thinking. He couldn’t pretend that he’d acted in the moment, got himself into this without consideration of the consequences. This was his choice, and it was on him. He’d gotten the gun from his room fully aware that he might need to use it, and on the drive to the forest he’d accepted that. He’d decided that if it was needed, he would pull the trigger. Better a death on his hands than the power of the ley line in the hands of Noah’s murderer.

But he hadn’t _known_. He hadn’t understood exactly what he was doing, even if he’d thought he was aware of the consequences. A sacrifice was needed to wake the ley line, and a sacrifice was what Adam had given it. Whelk’s death, and whatever was left of his own innocence.

Adam had seen death before. Working with Mr. Gray, it would have been impossible to pretend not to. But he had never before caused it.

He didn’t know how it made him feel. It was all too much - the way the gun bucked in his hand. The look on Whelk’s face when he felt the bullet hit. Adam’s finger on the trigger, the way it had felt for a moment as if _he_ had been the one who’d stopped breathing. And then the ley line, the power flowing through the forest, through him.

How was he supposed to feel? He’d killed a man for the first time, and he wasn’t sure he regretted it. He’d received this power, and he wasn’t sure he wanted it.

But better him than Whelk.

After Mr. Gray left, Adam had spent the night at Monmouth. He hadn’t wanted to go back to the Aglionby dorms, and he didn’t think Gansey or Ronan had wanted to let him out of their sight anyway. They didn’t know what had happened to him, if anything had happened. How could they? Even Adam wasn’t sure yet.

So he’d slept in Noah’s room, empty and cold. How could they have ever thought it belonged to a living boy? Noah seemed stronger now, with the ley line awake, but Adam didn’t have the focus to think about that right now.

He wasn’t sure he had the focus for much of anything. He saw flickers in the edges of his visions. He’d looked into the mirror in Monmouth’s strangely cluttered bathroom and thought he saw an entirely different person looking back. His dreams, the night before, had been full of images he did not understand.

Was it the ley line, or was it what he'd done?

Luckily it was the weekend. Mr. Gray had texted him earlier that morning, letting Adam know he’d made an appointment, to meet him at a certain location at a certain time. To bring Gansey and Ronan, if he wanted. He wasn’t sure Mr. Gray had seen Noah.

Whatever the appointment was for, it wasn’t until Sunday. Adam sat on the edge of Noah’s bed, putting his shoes on. He didn’t want to stay hidden away, even if he wasn’t sure what was going on inside his head. He knew he could leave the door closed and he would probably be left alone, because his friends didn’t quite know what to do with him right now, but he didn’t want to.

And that was something else. His friends. They were that, he knew. He might have come here to unravel the Lynch secrets, to find the Greywaren, but Gansey and Ronan and Noah had sunk their claws into him. Adam had never really had friends before, but he knew that he’d pulled that trigger not only to keep the power out of Whelk’s hands, but also because as long as Whelk was alive they would be in danger.

He’d almost shot Gansey, for Christ’s sake. He had killed Noah.

Those were Adam’s friends. But, he knew, they might not always be. His secrets were starting to weigh him down.

He stood and went out into the main room of Monmouth. Gansey was nowhere to be found, but Ronan had flung himself on the couch and was feeding something to Chainsaw. He did not look up when Adam came in, which gave Adam a long moment to look at him.

Ronan would never trust him again if he knew why Adam had come to Aglionby. Ronan was a creature of a firm, if odd, moral code, and getting close to someone so you could find a relic from their brutally murdered father was not something he could easily forgive. Adam understood that. He wouldn’t expect forgiveness.

But he wanted it. Ronan had become a friend, yes, but that wasn’t everything. ‘Friend’ wasn’t the right word to encompass the way it felt when Ronan looked at Adam like he was the only one in the room, the way Adam’s heart beat harder when Ronan smiled in that fierce way he had. ‘Friend’ did not describe the way Adam sometimes wondered what it would feel like to kiss him, to be kissed by Ronan Lynch.

He’d gotten in too deep. He was fucking this all up. The mission, Mr. Gray’s trust, Ronan’s, Gansey’s. There was no way to please everyone.

Adam’s stomach growled. Ronan looked up.

“Fuck, Parrish, and here I thought you had manners.”

It was a relief to know that, despite everything, Ronan was still Ronan. That he could watch Adam kill a man, see true magic, and still follow it all up with a shitty comment.

He was watching Adam in an almost assessing way. Adam didn’t know what Ronan saw when he looked at him, and though at other times he’d wanted very badly to know, right now he didn’t. He didn’t even want to know how he saw himself, but that was unavoidable.

Adam’s stomach growled again. He couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten. Before the ley line, he thought, before Whelk. He’d had no appetite after it happened.

“Do you have any food here?” Adam asked. It was a futile question, really. The fridge in the bathroom usually held drinks and leftovers and not much more, even though they had a small kitchen here at Monmouth. But he supposed Gansey and Ronan were rich enough to order food whenever they wanted.

Once upon a time, that knowledge would have curdled within him. He would have wished desperately for it. Now Adam just thought it was wasteful. They’d eat healthier and cheaper if they could cook, but rich boys all seemed to enjoy cultivating a certain refined helplessness. Adam didn’t understand it and didn’t really want to.

Ronan shrugged. “Chinese leftovers, maybe.”

“Get up,” Adam said. “We’re going to the store.” He eyed Ronan, who was making no move to get up. “You drive me and I’ll make breakfast for you, too.”

For a moment longer, Ronan looked at him, but the bribe seemed to be enough, and with a long sigh he pushed himself off the couch. It was possible he just didn’t want Adam to go off alone. He and Gansey had both watched him the night before, trying to be subtle in Gansey’s case and not even bothering to pretend in Ronan’s. After Mr. Gray had left, it had been awkward. It still was, a little.

They drove to the store. Chainsaw was left behind, ravens not often welcome in grocery stores. Ronan played his music too loud and Adam tried to focus on that instead of the power sparking inside him. It felt uneven, tangled. Or maybe that was only Adam’s mind.

Mr. Gray had said he would find someone who could help. Adam wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly. Who do you call when you’ve awoken an ancient ley line, inherited its power, and have no idea what to do?

He supposed if anyone knew the answer to that, it might be Mr. Gray. He had stores of knowledge that Adam did not, and seemed almost unflappable. The night before, though, he had seemed… worried, maybe. It felt strange, to be worried about by someone like Mr. Gray. Adam didn’t know if he was flattered or disturbed.

At the store, Adam picked up only the basics: eggs, bacon, hash browns, orange juice. Anything he didn’t use would almost certainly end up going to waste, and Adam hated wasting food. He’d spent too many nights hungry to be comfortable with that, even if those nights were in the past.

If he’d been less distracted, he would have known better. If he’d been less distracted, he might have noticed the truck in the parking lot, or remembered that Saturday mornings had often been grocery day for his parents. There was a reason he rarely went into Henrietta on the weekends, keeping himself to Aglionby or Gansey’s expeditions outside of town. But Adam was distracted, he was lost in his own mind, only able to focus on the simple act of getting groceries and the somewhat less simple act of listening to Ronan’s rude running commentary on said groceries.

He didn’t even realize how out of it he was until he heard her voice.

“Adam?”

He froze.

It had been months since he heard his mother’s voice. Ronan, next to him, went still. Adam couldn’t look at him, couldn’t move.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she said, and finally he could look at her.

She looked the same as she had the day he’d left. No, she looked older - but no, that wasn’t it, either. She did look the same, but it was Adam’s eyes that had changed.

She looked tired and fed up. Not angry - she had never indulged in anger the way his father had. She’d simply shaken her head and left Adam to his fate, broadcasting her disapproval in silence and turned-away eyes and quiet reminders that this was his fault, he should know that, if only he was a better son or a better person or just _better_ he wouldn’t bring this upon himself. The fact that he did meant that the flaw was in him, not in their family.

She stared at him. He stared back.

“Parrish - “ Ronan said next to him, and her brows drew down. She had not doubted it was him before, but now she knew. Now there was no pretending.

“You disappear for months, and now you show up out of nowhere?” She seemed to be taking it in stride more than Adam was. For a moment, all he could think was how grateful he was that he wasn’t in his Aglionby uniform. That she didn’t know where he’d gone, where he could be found. “Your father -”

He didn’t wait to hear what his father would do or say, or what he had done or said. The weight of her disapproval broke him, and he turned and left the store. He didn’t run, but he couldn’t stop himself either. He didn’t realize he’d left until he’d shut the BMW’s door, until he buried his face in his hands and shook.

He hadn’t seen his mother in months. He’d been shocked, terrified, lost. His thoughts were scattered, he felt like he couldn’t breathe. All he could think about were those nights in the trailer, his father’s anger, the look in his mother’s eyes. The same look they’d had in the store. Reproach, disapproval, a hint of fear.

Not joy, to see her missing son again. He had not expected it, when he’d thought about ever seeing his parents again - he had not expected to be embraced and loved and told that he’d been missed, that he had a place with them, that things would be different. He’d never really believed that.

But now he knew for certain.

He couldn’t breathe.

His father would know he was here now.

It felt like everything had been temporary. Mr. Gray, the traveling they’d done, the skills Adam had learned. How useful he had been, how he had felt valued and important, like Mr. Gray wanted him there, appreciated his skills and his help. He felt like it was disappearing, slipping through his hands, like he was about to wake up on his thin mattress in his father’s trailer again.

The other door slammed, and Ronan sank into the seat next to him. He had their bag of groceries.

“Parrish?” he said.

Adam couldn’t respond.

He should never have come back to Henrietta.

Ronan shifted in the driver’s seat. Adam knew he must be uncomfortable, confused, maybe angry that - well, that Adam’s lies were falling apart. He needed to get his shit together, figure out what to say. Tell the truth, maybe. But he couldn’t.

After a moment, Ronan started the BMW and drove away. He didn’t say anything, but he drove fast, with barely a nod at the speed limit. Normally that would bother Adam, but this time instead he found an odd comfort in it, in the way he couldn’t quite focus on anything passing them, the way everything became a Henrietta-colored blur instead of individual buildings or people.

It had been easy, for awhile, to ignore the memories. To pass streets that he’d once biked down, between jobs or after school. To pass the cafe where he’d briefly worked, until he had to call in sick one too many times after his father’s angry fists rendered him unable to work. To look away when he saw a face that seemed familar. To turn the corner when he heard an old classmate’s voice.

It had been easy. Henrietta was a small town, but even small towns had thousands of residents, and Adam had done his best to stay away from the places where _his folk_ usually spent their time. 

Maybe, though, it had only been a matter of time. Maybe he’d been an idiot to think he could hide in plain side. Maybe this had always been guaranteed to happen, sooner or later. Maybe it had always been waiting for him, a part of him, in his blood and his bones and his finger that had pulled the trigger of that gun.

Adam didn’t know how long they drove, but he could breathe again, after awhile. He didn’t know what to do, but at least he could start to think. All he wanted, in that moment, was to tell Ronan everything.

When they stopped, they weren’t at Monmouth or Aglionby. They were outside of town somewhere, maybe halfway to the mountains where the forest was. Adam could feel the ley line again - no, that wasn’t right, he’d never stopped feeling it. He’d only stopped being able to think about it. Now he could, it was back, the other problem he didn’t know how to solve.

Ronan got out of the car. Adam did too, not entirely sure why he was doing it. The fresh air against his face helped, though, it brought him back to himself. The rolling hills, the trees, the sky above, the ley line pulsing under his skin. He felt more real here, less like he was about to shatter.

Adam leaned against the car and looked up at the clouds. After a moment, Ronan leaned against the car next to him.

“That was my mother,” Adam said. He had not been aware he was going to say it until it was out of his mouth, and then it was too late. 

Ronan didn’t say anything.

“I didn’t really want to see her again,” Adam said, listening to the own distance in his voice. He didn’t know if that was true. It felt true, sometimes. Other times it felt like a bald-faced lie. Even with everything Mr. Gray had given him, even with being safe and unhurt and given a chance to grow and learn, sometimes Adam had missed his home with an ache he couldn’t control. Stockholm syndrome, maybe. Something broken so badly inside him that he missed the place he’d been miserable, the people who had made him unloved and unwanted.

He didn’t say anything else. He expected questions, and knew he deserved them. But Ronan always had a way of defying expectations. He was silent, and after a few moments of that, Adam looked at him.

Ronan was looking out at the forest. He didn’t look angry. He didn’t look anything, except vicious and dangerous and handsome, like he always did. Adam couldn’t read him. He’d always had trouble with that.

“I knew there was stuff you weren’t telling us,” Ronan said, finally. He still didn’t look at Adam. “But I figured it was none of my fucking business.”

For some reason, that felt like a blow. The knowledge that Ronan had known something was off about Adam, but that he hadn’t - what? Cared enough to want to know? Or was it just that he valued privacy? Ronan wasn’t really the kind of person who opened up about himself either, after all. After all these weeks, Adam was still no closer to finding the Greywaren, after all. Barely a clue.

“We all have secrets,” Ronan said. “It’s not my business to make you tell if you don’t want to.”

So that’s how it was.

Adam knew now that he wanted to. He also knew it would change things, even if he didn’t tell the whole truth. But part of him wanted to do that, too, even if he knew it was absolutely the stupidest thing he could do.

He thought about it. He turned it over in his mind. Before he could say anything, Ronan spoke first.

“So here’s one,” Ronan said, and he looked at Adam then, and he smiled, sharp and fierce. “I took Chainsaw out of my dreams.”

Adam stared.

“I can take anything out of my dreams.”

“Anything?” Adam said, weakly.

“You don’t believe me?” Ronan tilted his head, eyes bright now, maybe due to the thrill of saying it all aloud. “I’ll show you.”

“I believe you,” Adam said. He didn’t need a demonstration. He needed to know what to do with this information. It was all falling into place, the pieces of the puzzle he and Mr. Gray had been working on this whole time. The relic they’d been looking for, the item belonging to Niall Lynch that could create wondrous things, the thing Greenmantle wanted so badly. It wasn’t a relic.

It was Ronan.

Ronan was the Greywaren.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hanging with the psychics.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm alive! Life is very busy but I am writing when I have time. Thanks for sticking with me, and sorry that this chapter is mostly setup.

Adam knew, above all, that he needed to tell Mr. Gray about Ronan. He also knew this wasn’t a conversation they could have over text - or over the phone, where Gansey or Ronan might hear.

Adam had always been good at keeping secrets, but now it was beginning to feel too difficult. Like he was balancing too many things at once, and they were about to come crashing down. It felt inevitable, or maybe just like it _should_ be inevitable. He didn’t want to lie to Ronan. He didn’t want to tell the truth, either.

So for just a little longer, he said nothing. It was safer for everyone.

As it turned out, Gansey already knew about Ronan’s talent, as did Noah. That wasn’t really a surprise. Adam was the newcomer, and potentially untrustworthy (actually untrustworthy, he thought to himself), so it made sense that he would be the last to know. But Gansey had only learned about it very recently as well, and he was delighted to be able to discuss it with Adam. Adam, however, was not really in the mood for discussion.

His head pounded, his stomach clenched. Seeing his mother had been bad enough, but with the revelation of Ronan, and with everything else - whatever was going on with the forest, the things he was feeling - Adam felt unmoored from the world.

It wasn’t answers he needed. It was a course of action. He wouldn’t get that until he could speak to Mr. Gray again.

Ronan seemed unworried, like it didn’t matter that he’d told Adam, but Adam thought that wasn’t exactly the case. Instead, it was more like Ronan had decided to tell him and simply pushed stubbornly on through it, ignoring the chance of consequences. He’d made his choice - the choice to trust Adam - and that was all that mattered.

Adam could not help feeling that trusting him was a poor choice for everyone involved. Ronan. Mr. Gray. Gansey. Even Noah, who looked at him with pale eyes and seemed to see everything, but said nothing.

So Adam retreated to the spare room - Noah’s room - pleading weariness. Once there, he did the one thing that might help him focus his mind.

He did schoolwork.

He didn’t need to. He’d never needed to do as well in Aglionby’s classes as he did, but there was a part of Adam that simply had to. There was a not insignificant part of him that saw schoolwork as a port in a storm. Questions he could answer, assignments he could complete, all with exacting care and as close to perfection as he could manage.

Maybe he felt like he was failing everyone who trusted him, but he was still going to get an A on his calculus homework.

It was meaningless. It still helped.

Eventually, Adam was able to sleep.

The next day, Mr. Gray took him to the psychics.

Adam had hoped they would get a chance to talk on the way there, but Gansey’s eyes lit up at the idea of psychics, and then Ronan had to tag along too - watching Mr. Gray, unfriendly in that sullen, spiky way he had. Ronan did not like Mr. Gray, but Ronan didn’t like any adults. Ronan was not aware that he had every reason in the world to dislike Mr. Gray.

Some miserable part of Adam wanted to confess everything.

They arrived at the house, 300 Fox Way. Before anyone could knock, the door swung up. Inside stood a slender woman, small, with a vast cloud of blonde hair. She blinked at them.

“Oh,” she said, her dreamy eyes barely seeming to register their presence. “Our visitors are here.”

Mr. Gray seemed unruffled, but Adam saw him blink twice. Ronan bared his teeth, while Gansey looked two steps from delighted, reining in his interest as well as he could.

Adam, for his part, thought he should feel surprised, but he didn’t. What he felt was - he wasn’t sure how to describe it. A ripple, maybe. A wave? It felt like a drop of water falling into a vast ocean, only the ocean was inside him, and the water was also him.

He did not understand what his sacrifice had done to him, but he was beginning to realize that it was not a small change.

“Come inside,” the woman said, and drifted away from the door. Without discussion, they followed her in.

The inside of the house was cozy and crowded, decorated with flea market furniture and crowded with the belongings of far more people than Adam would have expected, given the size of the house. It felt like a home, in that indescribable way that Adam was still so unfamiliar with. Like people lived here and loved each other and felt safe.

“We came for a reading,” Mr. Gray said. “You were expecting us?” His voice was even and slightly amused. As with everything, he regained his bearings quickly. He could not do his job if he was easily thrown off.

“I’m not sure who we were expecting,” the woman said. Her eyes rested for a moment on Adam, and her head cocked to one side. “You’re all so very loud.”

Behind her, two more women appeared in the hallway, coming out of what seemed to be the kitchen. They assessed the motley collection that had washed up on their doorstep. One seemed decidedly unimpressed, while the other looked appreciative - at least when her eyes rested on Mr. Gray. 

“It took you long enough,” the unimpressed woman said. She had an air to her that was not dissimilar to Ronan - like she faced the world ready to fight, like she wasn’t fond of any of them, even if she’d just met them.

“It was worth the wait,” the last woman said, smiling just a bit. Adam watched Mr. Gray receive the smile, saw the interest flicker in his eyes. That, at least, sent a spark of amusement through him. But he had other things to worry about than Mr. Gray’s potential romance, and so, it seemed, did the psychics.

“You’re caught in the rapids,” the blonde woman said, looking directly at him. “It’s good that you came to us.”

“He’s the one who woke the ley line?” the unimpressed woman said, looking him over. Adam expected what he usually got, especially from adults - to be assessed and then dismissed, as the polite and unobtrusive boy he was. It was convenient for the work they did, for all that some part of Adam craved recognition. It wasn’t what he got this time, though. Her eyes narrowed, her gaze sharpened, and she reached out to take hold of his arm.

Adam flinched away, despite himself, but it didn’t matter, because Ronan had shoved himself between them. He scowled at the woman, not even attempting to be civil, and her hand landed on his arm instead.

She looked surprised, and then smiled. “Oh, this one’s good, too. A creator - or a killer, maybe? Or a creator of killers? A dreamer, on our doorstep.”

Ronan did not seem to know what to make of that, but he didn’t like it. He looked as if he was about to step forward, to snarl, to fight, but the blonde woman’s soft voice cut through the tension.

“Calla, they’re our guests.” Her distant gaze swept over Ronan, back to Adam. “Let’s speak alone. It’s too loud out here.”

Adam hesitated, but a quick look at the others decided him. He followed her into another room, which turned out to be the kitchen, pleasantly messy and with the comforting smell of baked goods in the air.

“Oh,” she said, “I’m Persephone,” as if she’d just realized that they had all failed to introduce themselves.

“Adam Parrish, ma’am,” he said, and she nodded as if he’d told her something she’d already known. Maybe he had.

“The best reading would be all of us together,” she said, “but with you here that might be too much in one room. Do you know what you’ve done?” There was nothing accusatory in her tone, but Adam felt as if he’d been accused anyway. He didn’t know. Not really. He’d acted because he had to, because the alternative was unacceptable, and now?

Now he didn’t know what he’d done, or what to do about it.

“I guess I made a sacrifice,” he said, and winced at the twang in his voice. He’d gotten so much better at hiding his accent, but here in this warm Henrietta home, the sort of home he’d always wished for, he found it getting away from him.

“There’s always been a ley line here. Ask your friend, the one you follow. But it was sleeping until you woke it.” Persephone puttered around the kitchen, opening cabinets and drawers, until with a soft sound of surprise she pulled something from one of the drawers. It turned out to be a deck of cards in a worn bag. Tarot cards.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Adam said, and when she looked at him then, her eyes seemed darker and sharper than before.

“We always have choices,” she said. She set the cards before him. “But that doesn’t mean those choices are always right or wrong. Sometimes they’re just choices. Take a card.”

Adam was pretty sure there was supposed to be more ceremony to a tarot reading. Wasn’t there supposed to be a room draped in silk, a crystal ball, candles? Incense, maybe, and exotic music? Not a simple deck of cards in front of him, in a kitchen that had an unwashed cereal bowl in the sink, with the sound of his friends and his mentor talking in the hallway.

He took a card.

Persephone tilted her head, looking at it. “Take another.”

Adam didn’t know anything about tarot cards, didn’t know the first thing about what the cards he was pulling meant. He took another, and then, at Persephone’s behest, a third.

She looked at them for a long moment, then nodded. “I thought it would be like this.”

Adam thought of demanding an answer, demanding clarity. Instead he waited, swallowing his thoughts.

“You need control. You need honesty. And you need to talk to him.” Persephone’s words were simple, clear. She reached out and touched his hand, with just the very tips of her fingers, and he felt something like a spark. Something like leaves rustling inside of him, responding to her presence, to the power that he now knew was inside her. “I can help you with one of those. The rest is up to you.”

Adam bit his lip. He wanted to dismiss her words - meaningless, vague, the sort of thing anyone could say - but he knew they were true. As vague as they might be, they were true, especially the last.

_You need to talk to him._

Mr. Gray, or Ronan? Or Gansey? Or Noah, even?

All of them.

But Adam couldn’t. He wasn’t yet ready to lose the only friends he’d ever had. He wasn’t ready for that level of honesty.

“Hmm,” Persephone said, and Adam thought he could detect a note of disappointment in her voice. “I’ll go get the one Maura likes. And pie, for both of you.”

And so she left, and Adam looked at the cards, and struggled with himself. This, at least, he’d already resolved to do. This at least wouldn’t ruin anything.

When Persephone came back, she brought Mr. Gray, and she brought two pieces of pecan pie. She set them on the table, pressed the tips of her fingers gently to Adam’s shoulder, and left the room again. Adam wasn’t sure what to make of the gesture. Comfort? A reminder? A warning?

He took a bite of the pie. It was incredibly good.

“This place is odd,” Mr. Gray said, taking a bite of his own pie. He said it conversationally, a mere observation, without judgment. If anything, Adam thought, he seemed to like it.

Adam looked at the kitchen door. Closed, with the muffled sound of voices behind it - Gansey’s, he thought, and someone else’s. A female voice. For now, he and Mr. Gray were alone. Finally.

“The Greywaren,” Adam said, with no preamble. That wasn’t their style, either of them, to waste time. Especially when work was involved, especially when Adam wasn’t sure how long they’d be alone. He needed to get this out. Only then could they decide what to do about it, because he certainly didn’t know. “It’s not an object. It’s a person.”

Mr. Gray looked at him, eyes sharp and intent. He set his fork down. It only took him a moment. He, like Adam, was good at making connections. Three Lynches left. Only one that Adam knew well. “Ronan.”

Adam nodded.

“That makes some things make more sense,” Mr. Gray said after a short silence. “Rather than an object, a person.” He looked like he was turning things over in his mind, working a puzzle into a different shape. Not one with all its pieces, not yet, but one where the picture was becoming clear. Where the picture was not what he had thought it would be at all.

His eyes met Adam’s. Neither of them had to say it aloud. Turning Ronan over to Mr. Gray’s employer was no longer an option.

“He’s your friend,” Mr. Gray said. “What do you think we should tell him?”

Part of Adam wanted to object. Ronan was not his friend. Ronan was the subject of their mission, the goal, a creature with some kind of magic that nobody understood. He barely liked Adam. Adam wasn’t the sort of person who made friends, who was able to make friends, and certainly not with someone like Ronan Lynch.

But they were. Friends, and maybe - maybe there was something else there too.

“He hates lying,” Adam said. “He won’t be happy with any of this, but we can’t keep it a secret. Others will be coming for him.”

For the Greywaren, anyway. And even if no one but them knew it was actually Ronan, the chances of the truth coming to light were too much. Ronan would be in danger no matter what. At least they could mitigate it, help, do _something_. Adam did not want to think about what the Greenmantles of the world would do with Ronan Lynch in their grasp.

Perhaps he was a cold person. When he’d thought it was an object, the idea had been unpleasant but acceptable. Knowing that it was a person instead, and a person he knew, a person he knew on some level that he cared for, changed everything. But Adam had never really been a good person, after all.

“They’re coming for him now,” Mr. Gray said. “There will be men arriving in Henrietta shortly. Our employer hasn’t been pleased with my progress, and he’ll be sending others to make certain all avenues have been searched. And they won’t be the only ones.”

Adam stiffened. It wasn’t a hypothetical, then. It wasn’t an _if_ , but a _when_ , and the when was soon. “You didn’t tell me.”

“I only just found out,” Mr. Gray said. He looked at Adam for a long moment, weighing something. “When the ley line surged, it attracted attention. Attention from all over the place, it seems. We won’t be alone here long.”

So it had been Adam’s fault. No - that wasn’t quite right. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been Whelk. He told himself that, held on to that fact, swallowed the guilt that was rising up inside him. _They would have come eventually anyway. The line would have been woken eventually anyway. It wasn’t my fault._

Of course, he knew that was bullshit. This was his fault. But it helped, at least a little.

“The best course is to hide him. At least for a little while, until I can lay another path. I can distract the searchers, given a certain amount of time.” Mr. Gray was already thinking, planning. This was what Adam admired about him - the utter composure, the ability to think under pressure. This was what they needed.

“I can help you,” Adam said, but Mr. Gray was already shaking his head.

“No. You’ll need to stay with Ronan Lynch. Even if we explain - and I believe we should - he doesn’t truly understand the threats arrayed against him. He’s hot-headed, and likely to run straight into danger if left on his own. And we don’t yet know how this new connection of yours will affect things. It’s wiser to keep you together and hidden, at least until something changes.”

Adam couldn’t really argue with any of that, but part of him felt strangely nervous. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to stay with Ronan - not that. It was all the secrets, all the unspoken words and hidden looks and everything he couldn’t say. But he nodded. Mr. Gray, as always, had a point.

“I have a safehouse,” Mr. Gray said. That wasn’t a surprise. They were always careful to prepare that sort of thing when on dangerous jobs - places to run to if necessary, places to lay low for awhile. Adam had done it for them in the past, but in this case it made more sense for Mr. Gray to take on the task. Not having to attend a fancy prep school made moving around Henrietta much easier.

“I don’t think he’ll like this,” Adam said. He said it because he had to, even though he was pretty sure both of them knew it already. There was no way Ronan would like the idea of hiding from danger. Somehow, they’d have to convince him.

“Let’s not waste time,” Mr. Gray said, and stood. Adam followed him out of the kitchen.

Gansey and Ronan were just then coming back into the hallway as well. Adam didn’t know what they’d been doing - a reading in the other room, maybe, or something else. He only knew that Ronan looked even spikier than usual, and Gansey looked as put-together as he always did in front of strangers, but there was something different in his eyes.

Following them out of the room was a girl. She was pretty, short and memorable, with hair dotted all over with clips that weren’t doing a great job of keeping it contained. She was vaguely familiar - and she would be, Adam thought, because they’d probably gone to school together at some point. Henrietta wasn’t very big.

She looked him over, a quick flicker of her eyes, then crossed her arms and frowned at Gansey. It looked like she’d been doing that since the moment they’d walked in, and despite everything, some part of Adam wanted to smile. “We really don’t need any more of you rich brats in here.”

“I was just gonna say we should leave,” Adam said, and wished he could swallow the words a moment later. His accent had slipped through, thicker than he ever let it. Maybe it was being here, with all these women whose voices were rich with Henrietta honey, or maybe it was stress, or maybe it was something else. He hated the sound of it on his lips, the way his vowels stretched. Gansey looked at him, surprised.

“Yes,” Mr. Gray said, stepping out into the hallway behind him, neatly cutting off anything Gansey might have said. “It’s time to go.” His eyes rested on Ronan. “You’ll come with us.” It wasn’t a request.

Predictably, Ronan did not like the tone of that. He straightened himself up, tall enough to be on a level with Mr. Gray, and scowled. “Fuck you.”

Mr. Gray wasn’t bothered. He barely blinked. “There will be people looking for you. You know why. It isn’t safe - for now, you need to hide.”

“I sure as hell don’t need to take orders from some shady fuck,” Ronan said.

“Ronan!” Gansey said, in full-on disappointed parent mode, “Remember what the cards said? You’re in danger.”

Whatever the psychics had told them, it matched perfectly with what Adam knew to be the truth. “They’re right,” he said. They would need to explain more, _Adam_ would need to explain more, but not here. Not this exact moment, with all these strangers here, psychic or not. “There are people looking for you. It’s not safe - not for you, or anyone close to you.”

It was a low blow. Ronan cared far more for Matthew’s safety, for Gansey’s, than for his own, and Adam knew that. But low or not, it was true. Anyone around Ronan was putting themselves in danger unknowingly. At least Adam knew what he was getting into.

Gansey met his gaze and nodded. He understood what Adam meant, at least to some extent - he understood that Ronan’s impossible abilities could be drawing attention, even if he didn’t know how far that went. Even if he didn’t know that’s why Adam was there too.

Ronan inhaled, loud and angry, and made an abortive movement, like he’d wanted to punch the wall but stopped himself. He looked at Adam, then Gansey, then away. “Where the fuck are we going?” He was angry still, tense, unhappy, but willing to go along with this for now. Adam had thought there’d be more of a fight.

“Somewhere safe,” Mr. Gray said. “It’s better not to give the exact location. Adam will stay there with you, while I take care of this.”

“Take care of this?” Gansey said, faint disbelief in his voice.

“I thought we were here about Parrish’s weird magic crap,” Ronan said. “Why the fuck is this about me all of a sudden?”

“It was always about the both of you,” Persephone said, her voice serene and soft, cutting through the tension in the hallway. “Adam, you should take this.” She pressed two things into his hands: a deck of tarot cards and a small tupperware container holding two pieces of pie.

“I can’t-” Adam started to say, but she only looked at him.

“I wish we had more time,” she said, “but this will help. Try to meditate, try to center yourself. I know it’s loud in there.”

Adam was not sure that advice was at all helpful, but he reassured himself that he could call her if he needed. The phone number was widely available, and he’d have a burner, and - well. There wasn’t much else he could do, not right now. Whatever else was going on (magic, secrets, impossible things), the most immediate threat was to Ronan. He could deal with everything else as it came.

“If Ronan is in danger, I’d like to help,” Gansey said. He was in full presidential mode, charismatic and commanding, his offer more like an order. Even Mr. Gray was not entirely unaffected - Adam could see it in his eyes.

“You may be able to,” he said, as if he were considering all the possible ways Richard Campbell Gansey the Third could be of use. There were countless, Adam was sure, but he didn’t want Gansey in danger either. He trusted Mr. Gray - he had to trust him - but he was beginning to realize that simply by coming here he’d likely derailed the lives of Ronan and Gansey both. Ronan would have been in danger regardless, thanks to his father, but Gansey? 

Adam felt responsible.

“If you need to, you can come back,” one of the other women said, the one who’d opened the door for them. Adam was fairly sure she was speaking directly to Mr. Gray.

“Thank you,” he said, holding her gaze for a long moment. Ronan exhaled, loud and noisy.

“Fuck. If we’re going, let’s just go,” he said. Adam had to agree.

“I’ll be in contact,” Mr. Gray said to Gansey, with the sort of nod that adults gave other adults, the sort that adults gave boys like Gansey. Gansey nodded in return, tension visible around his eyes. Adam could see that he was having trouble following all of this, having trouble understanding what was going on. Adam wished he could explain. He wished he had the time and the courage.

“I apologize again, Jane,” Gansey said to the girl, and Adam made a mental note to ask Ronan about that later. Then they were outside, Gansey climbing into the Pig with one deeply worried look at the rest of them. Adam and Ronan got into Mr. Gray’s nondescript rental car, and they pulled away, heading to the safehouse.

Adam realized suddenly that he’d be spending days, possibly even weeks, alone with Ronan. Just the two of them.

He didn’t know if the pit in his stomach was delight, fear, or some unholy mix of the two.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The truth comes out.

Ronan could honestly say he had no fucking idea what was going on. One minute they’d been at a house full of supposedly psychic women, letting them ask invasive questions, and the next he’d been forced into agreeing to go hide somewhere with Parrish.

Well, maybe not _forced_. Not exactly. But Ronan wasn’t sure he’d have agreed if not for - everything.

Gansey’s concern. The look in Adam’s eye when he said _it’s not safe_. The witchy women, all with their bullshit, talking to him like they knew anything.

The worst part was, they had. He’d gone into the other room with Gansey, and he hadn’t wanted to let them read anything for him but they had. Danger, and secrets, and other vague pronouncements that Gansey swallowed hook, line, and sinker. Ronan would have told them to go fuck themselves if it hadn’t been just a little too accurate.

One of them had mentioned his father. Another had called him, the moment she saw him, a dreamer.

There had always been danger. Ronan had known that since the moment he found his father’s body, his blood soaking into the gravel of the driveway, his face unrecognizable. Life had been idyllic before then, and he hadn’t even realized it, not until it was gone. Afterward, he knew that danger was real, that it could come for any of them at any time.

Part of him hadn’t cared. The rest of him had taken note, and held his secret close, sharing it only with those he trusted: Gansey. Noah, who he didn’t quite remember telling but who definitely knew.

Adam.

Did he trust Adam? Or did he just want to, because Adam’s distant eyes haunted his dreams, because he could not help thinking about what Adam’s thin fingers might feel like against his skin?

He definitely _didn’t_ trust this asshole who claimed to be Adam’s guardian, but here they were, at ‘somewhere safe’ that belonged to him. And who the fuck was he? Who the fuck was Adam?

The man - Mr. Gray, Adam called him - had brought them there and then left after exchanging quiet words with Adam. He’d only looked at Ronan, but his gaze was cool and penetrating, his eyes like flat stones in his face, a more refined and much less appealing version of the look that Adam trained on him sometimes.

They weren’t the same, but Ronan was observant. When he saw them together, speaking to each other, he could see echoes. They had spent a good deal of time together, but they didn’t act like family. More like - coworkers, maybe. And that made Ronan uncomfortable in a way he couldn’t put his finger on.

But he was there, and Adam was there. And if things really were dangerous, if Ronan really was in some kind of danger… well, he didn’t much care what happened to him. But Gansey, Noah (dead or alive, it didn’t matter), and most of all Matthew - he cared what happened to them. He would do what was necessary to keep them safe.

If only he had any real idea of what that was.

They were no longer in Henrietta. Not that there was much of an appreciable difference between this town and Henrietta - it was also small, not particularly notable, and probably very boring. The only difference seemed to be the lack of a rich boy prep school and the lack of a ley line. It was about half an hour away from Henrietta, which Ronan supposed made sense - close enough to get to them quickly if something happened, far enough away that no one would think to look for them there.

It felt strange thinking like that. Unnatural, maybe. It was Ronan Lynch, trying to think like Adam Parrish.

When Ronan heard ‘someplace safe’, he’d imagined something much more dramatic. An underground bunker, maybe, or a hidden room in an abandoned building. This was just an apartment, anonymous among many others in the same complex, a complex which was not particularly expensive or rundown. Ronan had never lived in a place like this, but he knew millions of people across the country did. He supposed that among them, he and Adam were reasonably anonymous.

The apartment was bland. Two bedrooms, one bathroom. It had come furnished, or maybe the furniture was rented, but either way that didn’t have any personality either. Mr. Gray had swung by Monmouth long enough to let Ronan grab some things, shoved into a ratty backpack that now rested on the beige sofa. They hadn’t stopped by Aglionby, though. Adam didn’t have anything with him.

Unable to think of anything else to do, Ronan followed Adam through the apartment, gnawing at the leather bands around his wrists. He felt restless, uncertain. Adam seemed to have purpose, seemed to know what he was doing, and Ronan wasn’t sure whether that was reassuring or whether it only served to make him feel even more uncertain, because _he_ had no idea what he was doing.

In the kitchen, Adam checked the cabinets and the fridge. There was food in them, a decent amount, and dishes and silverware. The bathroom had soap and shampoo. Both of the rooms had a few sets of clothing already in them, untouched and new. Unremarkable jeans and t-shirts for Adam, more professional clothing for Mr. Gray.

Nothing had been used. No one had ever lived here. This wasn’t Adam’s home, it wasn’t where he was from. Ronan wasn’t even sure he’d ever stepped into this apartment before. He looked odd here, like an endangered forest creature in the middle of the blandest housing development known to man, and he kept cocking his head just a little, like he was trying to hear someone talking from the other room.

There wasn’t anyone. Of course there wasn’t.

They made their way back to the living room, where Ronan threw himself on the sofa. “At least we don’t have to go back to school.”

Adam shot him a look, disapproving, but Ronan thought he caught a hint of amusement there too. “Look at you, finding the bright side.”

“What the hell are we supposed to do here?” Ronan asked. It was sinking in, now, that he was stuck in this apartment, with Adam, for an unknown amount of time. _Alone_ with Adam. Unbidden, his thoughts jumped to things he and Adam could do alone in an apartment, and then he had to drag them away.

“We can go out a little,” Adam said, “as long as we’re careful. But it’s safer if we stay inside as much as possible.”

Ronan thought of his car, tucked away safely at Monmouth. Just the idea of being stuck inside made his skin itch, made him want to climb in the driver’s seat and break a few speed limits. He thought of Gansey, he thought of Matthew, he thought of their safety, but it didn’t really help. He pushed himself off the sofa, restless, and wandered into the kitchen, opening cabinets.

“You even got dishes and crap for this place. Pretty fucking thorough.”

“It came furnished,” Adam said, lingering in the kitchen entrance less than an arm’s length away. “Things are a lot easier that way.”

Ronan shot Adam a look, but Adam wasn’t quite looking at him. He hadn’t turned the kitchen light on, and instead the sunlight was the only thing illuminating the room. It was late now, the sun beginning to set, and the evening light seemed to line Adam’s cheekbones in gold, painting him in sepia shades.

Ronan wanted. It didn’t seem to matter that he wasn’t sure he could trust Adam anymore, that he wasn’t sure what was going on, that he wasn’t sure any of this was going to end well. He wanted.

Then Adam looked at him, and the room felt charged.

Adam opened his mouth like he was about to say something, then closed it, as if he’d thought better or maybe his words had just scattered. Ronan did not think words were even in the realm of what he wanted right now.

And it was impulse, just impulse, that made him lean in and press his lips to Adam’s.

Later, he’d think about it. Later, he’d crawl with uncertainty, with questions for himself and for whatever might be listening. It wasn’t new, liking boys, and it wasn’t new liking Adam, but neither was something Ronan had ever put to words. He’d let it play in the background, let it stay in his quiet thoughts and his icy dreams and in the thought of the line of Adam’s slender neck when he took himself in hand at night.

It had not been easy to ignore, but Ronan was good at secrets, and this was one he’d had trouble admitting even to himself.

But he kissed Adam.

And Adam kissed him back.

It was clumsy at first, sudden and unexpected and awkward, but Adam’s lips moved against his and they settled into each other, and then it was everything. Warm and soft and a little chapped, just on the edge of hungry, and Ronan wanted more. He wanted so much more. In that moment, it felt like he wanted everything.

Then Adam pulled away, and Ronan felt the loss.

“We shouldn’t,” Adam said, and Ronan didn’t know what to think. Or rather, he didn’t know if he _could_ think.

“You don’t want to,” Ronan said. It felt more like an accusation than a question. He could feel the anger rising, consuming the fear, the uncertainty. He had always been good at that.

“No,” Adam said, and his answer was sudden and absolute. It set Ronan aback. “It’s not - it’s not that easy.”

Ronan had not known what to think of any of this since the beginning, since he leaned in to kiss Adam, and he especially didn’t know what to think now. Easy? What about this was easy? Ronan didn’t know what the fuck was going on, not with Adam, not with anything. This was a million miles from easy.

Kissing Adam, though. That had been impossibly easy.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Ronan said. He didn’t like the way his voice curled around the words, he didn’t like the way Adam looked at him. Normally he would have. Normally his sharp edges were something he displayed, something he was proud of. He’d cultivated that, he’d made himself into a blade. A snake. An attack dog.

That wasn’t the way he wanted Adam to look at him, though.

“Why do you think we’re here, Ronan?” Adam said, his voice hard now. “They’re looking for you, because you’re the Greywaren.”

“That has fuck-all to do with this,” Ronan said, gesturing between them.

“It has everything to do with this,” Adam said. “Why do you think I came to Aglionby?”

And that - that made sense. It took a moment, but the pieces fell into place. Adam, watching him, could clearly see it on his face, that moment when Ronan put it all together.

He didn’t know why he hadn’t figured it out before. The moment when they’d started talking in the hallway, when Mr. Gray had said he needed to go somewhere safe, it should have been obvious. He hadn’t paid enough attention, or he’d been too distracted by Gansey and the fraud psychics and fucking Adam Parrish and his stupid face.

Of course. Adam, mysterious and self-contained, had shown up in the middle of the school year to attend Aglionby. He’d wormed his way into Gansey’s good graces, and Ronan had thought that was about Gansey, but it had never been about Gansey. It was about him. From the beginning, it had been about him.

He stepped away, needing distance, needing to move.

“So, what? You were looking for me too?” He knew the answer. But somehow, somehow it would make more sense if Adam said it.

“We didn’t know it was you. Our employer had us looking for the Greywaren.” Adam didn’t approach him, instead watching warily, like he didn’t know what Ronan might do. “I - we - thought it was an object. A thing. Not a person, not _you._ ”

_We._ Adam and Mr. Gray, two peas in a pod, keeping secrets. But Adam always had, hadn’t he? Ronan had known that from the beginning, from the way Adam skirted certain topics, changed the subject if someone pressed to hard. From the beginning, Ronan had wanted to figure him out, at first because he didn’t trust him and didn’t want him near Gansey, and then simply because he wanted to solve the puzzle of Adam Parrish.

But here was part of the solution, and he did not like it.

Ronan strode the length of the kitchen, needing to move. There was an itch under his skin, like just before he’d kissed Adam, but more destructive. 

“You lied to us,” he said, fists clenching uselessly.

Adam at least had the grace to keep from disagreeing with that. He looked at Ronan, steady and unflinching, and when Ronan met his eyes he thought he saw regret. Apology. Pleading. But he couldn’t hold Adam’s gaze, not with this anger rising inside him, not with the memory of Adam’s lips against his.

He’d known that Adam was keeping things from them, and he’d let his feelings get away from him anyway.

“I had to,” Adam said, “you know that I had to.”

Ronan knew, maybe, but he didn’t give a shit. It didn’t change anything. “Who the fuck are you? Is Adam even your real name?” _Did you ever give a shit about us?_ He couldn’t ask it. He couldn’t care about the answer, because if Adam had been lying to them from the beginning, why would he have been honest about their friendship? He’d seemed to like them. He’d seemed to be having fun when they were all together, even when it was just him and Ronan.

But who the fuck knew anymore?

Adam’s voice was more urgent now, stressed, and there it was. That hint of an accent that poked through occasionally, past what must have been long practice. “I didn’t lie about that. It’s my real name. I already had an acceptance at Aglionby under it, so - so it just made sense to use it.”

“That _woman_ we met -” Adam’s emotion had seemed so real. He’d been frozen, frightened, somewhere else. That it had been an act was almost impossible to imagine, but Ronan did not know what to think. 

“My mother,” Adam said, and now his voice was flat. Ronan risked a look at him, could practically see the doors being shut, the emotions being shoved away. But he couldn’t give a shit, not about that, not right now.

“Right. I’m supposed to believe that? Anything you say?” He wanted to break something, but he could only clench his fists, pace, feel like he was going to explode.

“I was born in Henrietta,” Adam said, biting out each word as if it was poison on his tongue. “I left with Mr. Gray. I never thought I’d come back and see her again, but I did, because we had to find the Greywaren. We had to find _you._ But I didn’t know it was you. Nobody did. We all thought it was a - a box, a tool, an object. Not a person.”

He repeated those words with care, with an emotion that Ronan could not identify. _Not a person._ Not him. 

“So, yes. I lied. I got close to Gansey to get close to you, because Mr. Gray and I thought we might be able to get you to tell us where it was. But Ronan, you don’t understand -”

“I don’t fucking need to,” Ronan snarled, wheeling on Adam, at the other end of the kitchen because he needed the distance, he needed the air. “You lied to us from the beginning. Gansey fucking thinks you hung the stars, and you never gave a shit about him. I -” _I kissed you, I wanted you, I still do._ And he should have known better.

“That isn’t true,” Adam said, his words growing heated again. “Gansey is my friend, and so are you. I might have lied to you both, but that doesn’t change how I feel about either of you.”

“It fucking well changes how I feel about you,” Ronan said, though part of him twinged at the words, because he was not entirely certain they were true. In that moment, maybe, but when he looked at Adam he didn’t feel hatred. Only confusion, betrayal, anger. “So, what? I’m trapped here until you fucking deliver me to whoever wanted the Greywaren? Or sell me? Is that what you’re in this for, Parrish? Money?”

He saw it then, because he was looking at Adam. The instant of anger, pure and intense. “Of course it wasn’t. Do you know what he’d do if we gave you to him? He’d take you apart, piece by piece, until he could figure out how you worked. Or he’d break you until you were nothing but an object that dreamed for him. It’s true, when we didn’t know it was you we thought we would give it to him - that’s what we’re paid for, that’s our _job_. But I can’t do it now that we know. That’s why you’re here, that’s why we’re both here.”

“But you would have if it wasn’t me? If it wasn’t a person? Jesus Mary, Parrish, if this asshole is that bad what did you think he’d do with it? If he’s that bad, then why the fuck are you working for him?”

“We would have, because it’s our job. It’s _my_ job.” Adam was moving now, pacing, no longer as still as a blade of grass. “And because he’s not going to let this go. He won’t now, he’s going to send people after us. He might not know about you yet, but he’ll know that we’ve found something, that we’ve stopped answering to him. And yeah, Lynch, he’s that fucking bad. He’ll kill us to get to you, just like he killed your father.”

Ronan froze, ice in his veins, something much hotter in his heart. “What?”

Adam’s thin lips pressed together. Ronan didn’t know if that had slipped out or if he’d said it on purpose. He wasn’t sure it mattered, now that it was out. He wasn’t sure anything mattered.

“He killed your father,” Adam said, with deliberate care, “to find the Greywaren.”

“ _Who?_ ” Ronan bit out, tired of the uncertainty, the careful skirting around of Adam’s employer. The secrets.

“Colin Greenmantle,” Adam said, and then paused. When he spoke again, it was quieter. “Mr. Gray was the one who did it.”

Ronan stared at him. He needed to break things. He needed to drive 90 miles down the freeway. He needed to drink until he blacked out. He needed to hit something, someone, and Adam was the only thing here.

“And you,” he snarled, venom dripping from his words, “work for him.”

He shoved past Adam, out of the kitchen, out of the door, out of the beige apartment. Adam didn’t say anything. Adam didn’t follow him.

He walked. He wanted to get in his car and drive, but it wasn’t there, so he walked until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and then he punched a wall hard enough to split his knuckles, and it didn’t help. It didn’t fucking help at all.

He’d liked Adam, cared about him, spent time with him, told him secrets. _Kissed_ him. And the whole time, Adam had been working for the man who’d had his father killed, _with_ the man who had done it.

He walked again. He didn’t know how long he walked, how far, but eventually he felt like he could breathe again. The sun was starting to go down and he didn’t know what to do.

He didn’t want to see Adam’s face again. If he’d had his phone, he could get back to Henrietta, but that was back at Monmouth. He could hitchhike. He could walk. He wanted to get away, he wanted to go back to people he could trust. Gansey. Noah. Matthew. Not Declan, who probably knew all about this.

But he could not help thinking about what Adam had said. _He’d take you apart, piece by piece, until he could figure out how you worked._

This man, Colin Greenmantle, had already killed his father. What would he do to Ronan’s friends? To the people he cared about? They weren’t safe now, but they’d be even less safe if he were with them. 

He didn’t understand why Adam had told him all that. The truth. He could have kept it a secret, he could have kept lying, and Ronan would never have known better. Oh, it probably all would have come crashing down sooner or later, but why now? Why when he needed Ronan to stay close to him, when Ronan had kissed him? Lying would have been easier. Ronan knew enough to know that.

He did not want to forgive Adam, but his honesty was a problem Ronan didn’t know the answer to.

He stood there, on a street corner in the deepening darkness, trying to decide. Go home, go back to that apartment with someone he couldn’t trust, go somewhere else? He wished he could ask Gansey. He wished he didn’t still feel so angry he could barely think. So lost.

A raven’s throaty caws broke his reverie, and he looked up just as Chainsaw landed on the guardrail next to him. She croaked again, shuffled closer.

It could have been another raven, but he knew it wasn’t. She was his, on a basic and innate level, and he knew her. But he’d left her with Gansey at Monmouth - she was young still, and Ronan hadn’t been sure whether he’d be able to take care of her where they were going.

“Kerah,” she croaked, and flapped clumsily over the distance between them to perch on his shoulder. Her sharp beak nipped at his ear, as if to scold him for leaving her.

“Ow, fuck,” Ronan said, and scowled at her. She’d flown all the way from Henrietta for him, his dream creation, a piece of himself.

He just wanted to leave. To disappear and leave all this shit behind. But he couldn’t, could he? He would always be what he was. _Greywaren._ And that would never be safe. The memory of finding his father’s body was burned into his thoughts, his dreams, and now he thought of those other dreams. That body, but Gansey’s face. Matthew’s. The people he loved, in danger because of him.

When he got back to the apartment, the door to Adam’s bedroom was closed, which was good, because Ronan wasn’t sure what he’d do when he saw Adam’s lying face again. He went into the other room instead, taking Chainsaw and the bottle of Jameson he’d picked up on the way back.

He drank most of the bottle that night.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ronan has a bad dream.

The Gray Man needed to cover the Lynch boy’s trail. Now that he knew Ronan Lynch was the Greywaren, it seemed blindingly obvious. It seemed impossible anyone had missed it before. Ronan Lynch was, and probably Niall Lynch had been. And the brothers? The wife?

He would have to find out. It was necessary, now, to keep the boy safe and to keep Adam, who had clearly gotten attached, safe.

He wasn’t entirely sure what to think of that. On one hand, he found himself pleased that Adam had allowed himself to become attached to anyone. Even with him, in the months they’d been together, Adam had been quiet and observant and distant. The Gray Man had not known how to bridge that gap, how to make him feel as if he belonged, but was that any surprise? They were too similar, in too many ways. He cared for Adam but did not know how to express it in a way that would not unsettle the boy, remind him of the lack of love he’d grown up with. He thought that Adam felt similarly.

Ronan Lynch was different. A boy his own age, a unique boy, a difficult boy. Also similar to Adam, in some ways, but strikingly different as well. Perhaps if the Gray Man had remembered more about being a teenager, he would have anticipated Adam getting attached. If not to Ronan, than to the other one - Gansey.

But he hadn’t anticipated it. Still, when it all came down to practicalities, when he stripped away his own emotions about the boy who had become his protege, it didn’t matter. He would not have been willing to turn Ronan Lynch over to Colin Greenmantle regardless of Adam’s feelings for him.

So he needed to find every bit of evidence that pointed to Ronan Lynch being the Greywaren, and he needed to cover it up or destroy it. He needed to muddy the waters, plant false trails. He needed to make it seem reasonable that he was unable to find the thing that Greenmantle wanted so very badly.

He enlisted help. Only those who already knew - the Gansey scion, mainly, who could show him where Ronan’s most impossible things were. Once he saw the dream detritus littering the floor of Ronan’s room, he knew that anyone with the slightest idea of what they were looking for would be alerted instantly by the oddness scattered about. He wondered how Lynch had explained it to others, the strange things he had, the strangeness surrounding him. Maybe more than just his close friends had known. That was something else to take into account.

“What about his car?” Gansey asked from the doorway. There was a line between his brows, a permanent look of worry to his face that was only alleviated in those moments when the Gray Man passed on messages from Adam, reassurances of his and Ronan’s safety. He thought there was something else behind those message, but took them at face value, didn’t pry. Adam would not lie to him. If there was something else going on, it wasn’t currently important.

“We need to clean that out as well,” he said. “You should do it.” It would look less odd, should someone come to this abandoned factory they called home. Gansey cleaning out the vehicle of his friend and roommate was considerably less of note than a strange adult man doing so.

“I’ll help,” Blue said, in her challenging way. Maura’s daughter, and the Gray Man should probably have refused her assistance, except that Maura had said she would help. He was not going to go against the advice of a psychic, and perhaps he also had simply not wanted to go against the advice of that woman.

It was possible that returning to Henrietta would be the undoing of both himself and Adam Parrish.

He set that thought aside and nodded at her, listening to them clattering down the stairs as he went through Ronan’s room methodically. Once upon a time, doing this had felt invasive. Now it was simply part of the job, but he wondered if Adam would still have that feeling, if he had been the one doing this.

He did not allow himself to get distracted by the strange things he found. Impossible dream things scattered among the trash of a teenage boy - a fork with two invisible tines buried under crumpled fast food wrappers. Dirty laundry next to a pair of headphones that, when listened to, played endless 80’s synthpop from no discernable source. Unfinished homework assignments. A pen that only wrote swear words. Empty bottles of beer and whiskey. A flower that didn’t wilt, in the exact same shade of blue as Adam Parrish’s eyes.

It seemed Adam wasn’t the only one who was attached.

He was nearly done when he heard noises outside. Muffled voices, so it was the tone rather than the words that caught his attention. Blue’s voice, tight with annoyance, and Gansey’s, even and measured but tense.

He made his way to the door and opened it enough so he could hear without being seen, though this meant he could only see in bits and pieces. Right now, his view was of a garishly painted Mitsubishi Evo, pulled up in the parking lot of the factory.

“You keeping him on a tight leash now, Dick?” an unfamiliar voice said. Male, young. Another Aglionby student.

“Did you need something?” Gansey asked, unfailingly polite in that way very rich people were when they wanted you to know you were nothing to them.

“I need precious little Lynch to answer my texts,” the other boy said, and the Gray Man thought of Ronan Lynch’s phone, safely in his glove compartment. He’d turned it off.

“Did he ever?” Blue said, condescending and with clear dislike in her voice. The other boy did not seem to acknowledge her.

“Tell him he better start,” he said, “or things are gonna get ugly.” His nasty enjoyment at the vague threat was palpable. “See you around, Dickie boy.”

The Gray Man saw him as he got into his car and left. Joseph Kavinsky. No one particularly notable, except for his family ties to a minor crime empire. But he was interested in Ronan, and that was far more notable.

He made a mental note: look into Joseph Kavinsky.

***

Adam had not been sure that Ronan would return. He had, in fact, been half-certain that Ronan would disappear, would return to Henrietta, would throw himself right back into the danger they’d tried to get him out of. And then Adam would have had to explain his failure to Mr. Gray, and they’d have had to come up with another plan - but that wasn’t what frightened him. The prospect of failure was never a pleasant one, but Mr. Gray was not a cruel teacher.

No, what frightened Adam was the possibility that that option would end with Ronan in the hands of Greenmantle. That outcome was not one that he wanted to entertain for long.

He knew Mr. Gray was doing whatever he could to cover their tracks, to lay a false trail, but it was only a matter of time before Greenmantle contacted them, wanting to know their progress. Wanting results. Adam wasn’t sure what would happen then, and he _really_ wasn’t sure what would happen if they didn’t even know where Ronan was then.

But he knew with stark clarity that, after his confession, it was entirely likely Ronan would not return.

And could Adam blame him? Really?

There were some things Adam could not understand: Ronan’s love for his father, his loyalty to his family, his uncompromising nature. His habit of being ruled by his emotions, when Adam tried so very hard not to let himself be ruled by anything but practicality and resourcefulness.

Even so, all that Adam needed to understand was one thing: betrayal.

He had betrayed Ronan’s trust, and there could be no argument about that. Even if it had been part of his job, even if it was what he needed to do, that didn’t make it right. And to Adam, that had always been understandable - been necessary. In the world of the Gray Man, in Adam’s world, necessity came before all. If you had to betray someone to get what you needed done, you did. That was the job. That was the life.

But that was not Ronan’s life, and Mr. Gray had taken so much from him. Adam had known he would not receive forgiveness for allying himself with the killer of Niall Lynch, and so he’d known telling the truth was a risk. A huge risk, one he probably should have avoided.

But how could he have? How could he ask Ronan to trust him with his own life and yet continue lying to him? How could he conceal it, knowing it was a bomb that would explode someday? There was no way they could have kept this from Ronan forever.

Besides, Adam told himself, trying to justify it. It’s not as if Ronan thought he was a good person.

He’d seen Adam kill Barrington Whelk.

So when Adam heard the door slam, heard stomping boots into the other bedroom, part of him was shocked, the rest utterly relieved. Ronan had returned, had decided for whatever reason to come back. Adam didn’t know why. Adam, honestly, didn’t care. He was only relieved at that choice.

He didn’t venture out of his room, uncertain if his choice to not do so was caution or cowardice. It came out to the same thing. Facing Ronan right now wasn’t a good idea, not when Adam’s betrayal was so fresh, but he also didn’t know what he could possibly say.

Of course it was wrong to make someone trust you when you’d allied yourself with the person who had destroyed their life. It didn’t matter that Adam hadn’t had a hand in Niall’s death, it didn’t matter that they hadn’t known each other. 

Adam felt like it should matter, at least to him. He felt like it should feel unfair to be carrying the weight of what the Gray Man had done to the Lynches. But that wasn’t what it felt like, because in the end, it _didn’t_ matter.

He hadn’t killed Niall Lynch. He hadn’t even known Mr. Gray then. But he’d helped Mr. Gray end other lives, lives that had families and homes and people who cared for them as deeply as Ronan had cared for his father. He’d lied to those people and been an accomplice in their deaths, even if he never had a hand in the act itself. He’d known at the time what he was doing, and he knew now.

And, of course, there was Barrington Whelk. Adam still could feel the weight of the gun in his hand, the kickback as it fired, the expression on Whelk’s face. His empty eyes, afterwards. His body limp.

If Ronan hated him for what he hadn’t done, that was fine. There were people out there who deserved to hate him for things he had done, and they didn’t know, and they never would.

It was only fair he lose something he so badly wanted because of the choices he’d made. 

He stayed in his room that night and avoided Ronan for the next couple days.

It was difficult in that small apartment, but not impossible. Ronan helped by mostly staying in the other bedroom and occasionally going on walks (which Adam always feared he wouldn’t return from). It felt like they were hyper-aware of each other’s presence - Ronan slipping out to shower after Adam went to bed, Adam making something to eat after Ronan had left the apartment.

He always left some for Ronan. It wasn’t an apology, it wasn’t a peace offering, though perhaps Ronan took it that way. It was something else, maybe. A reminder that they were in this together, for all that Ronan might hate him now. And Ronan always came back from his walks, was always there, moving in his room, when Adam awoke. He could hear Chainsaw, too, croaking and cawing, though Adam wasn’t sure where she’d come from. It wasn’t like he could ask.

It was like that, tense and silent and strained, until the third night.

Until Ronan had a nightmare.

Adam woke suddenly. He couldn’t put a finger on why - it wasn’t a sound, but more like a movement, like the earth had disappeared from beneath him for a moment. The room, the world, was firm around him now, but he felt weak. Something felt off.

It was like the shadows he’d been seeing in the corners of his eyes, the reflections in the mirror of people who weren’t there. It was the ley line, that was the only explanation Adam had, because it was either that or he was losing his mind. He’d entertained that possibility as well. It wasn’t worth the fear and insecurity, so he discarded it, or tried to.

But it was something, he’d felt something, and it had been enough to wake him from a deep sleep.

The question of what it had been hung in the air, but another question arose the moment he heard thumps and swearing from Ronan’s room.

Adam hesitated, torn between concern and the instinct to leave the silence and distance that had grown between them, but then something crashed to the floor and he was on his feet.

There was a gun in the drawer of his bedside table, but the moment Adam’s fingers touched it he thought of the expression on Whelk’s face. He took the knife next to it instead, a hunting knife, sharp and deadly. Not as deadly as a gun, but it would have to do.

He did not rush into Ronan’s room. He had been trained too well for that. Instead, Adam crept along the hallway, listening to the crashes and swearing and alarmed cawing from the other bedroom. There was someone - something - in there with Ronan, and Adam had no idea what it was.

He didn’t rush, but he didn’t pause either. The moment he reached the door, he swung it open, revealing a nightmarish scene.

It was - something. Adam didn’t know what. A stretched-out birdlike creature, or at least it had wings and claws and a beak, but it wasn’t a bird. It was a monster, and it was trying to kill Ronan.

Adam opened the door just in time to see it hurl itself across the room at Ronan, who was holding the lamp from the bedside table. He didn’t have anything else - there hadn’t been a gun in _his_ drawer. There were scratches along his arm, some bare scrapes and some deep and bloody. Chainsaw was fluttering in a corner, cawing, diving at the creature’s head.

Adam took it in in a moment, and then he moved.

He was better with guns. He was better when he didn’t have to get in close, when he didn’t have to consider fists against flesh, the backdrop of his childhood. He should have grabbed the gun, but he hadn’t, and now he needed to make do with what he had.

He grabbed the blanket off the bed and ran at the creature, throwing himself bodily against it with the blanket in front of him so it tangled in the creature’s limbs. Adam’s body weight did not seem to throw it particularly off balance, but he kept it from reaching Ronan, the fabric blocking those claws for a moment or two.

Ronan either wasn’t surprised to see him or was too full of adrenaline to really notice. The moment the monster stumbled, he brought the lamp down on its head hard, shattering the metal base. It was enough force to drive the creature to the ground, and that was when Adam made use of the knife.

He didn’t know if the creature had a heart, or if it did where exactly it was, so he ran the blade through its throat instead. It brought his hand perilously close to that sharp beak, but he was able to move quickly enough, or maybe the creature was stunned enough, that he managed safely.

Then, prudently - or maybe because of the terror running beneath his skin - Adam stabbed it again in the chest, and then again, and then twice more until it stopped moving.

He was breathing hard, after, and the moment he let go of the knife he saw his hands were shaking. Adam had learned so much from Mr. Gray, but how to kill a nightmare had not been one of those things.

It wasn’t moving. Blood soaked the blanket and the floor and Adam’s hands, plus a spray of droplets on his clothing. He ignored it - it was just blood, though who knew what the blood of a monster might do - and looked at Ronan.

Ronan stood, still as a statue. His own blood dripped down his arms. There was a small slash on his face too, from a claw or maybe something else, it was impossible to tell.

There was no point in asking if he was all right. Neither of them were. There was no point in falling back into silence and distance, either. They’d just killed a monster together, and Ronan needed medical attention.

“Come on,” Adam said. “I’ll get the first aid kit.”

The hospital wasn’t an option. They were two teenagers who didn’t have an explanation for any of this. But the first aid kit Mr. Gray had stashed here was extensive, and Adam had used it before. It turned out that taking care of his own injuries, gifts from his raging father, had given him a solid foundation for first aid skills. That had been one of the first things Adam learned.

Silently, Ronan followed him to the bathroom, leaving small drops of blood all the way down the hallway. Some part of Adam’s mind noted that as another thing they’d have to clean up - the part that was already trying to figure out how they’d dispose of the monster’s corpse, given that they were in the middle of an apartment complex and had no car.

Ronan closed the toilet seat lid and sat, looking down at his bloody arms with an expression that was more disappointed than disturbed. Adam held his questions (he had so many, now that the fear and adrenaline was ebbing away), retrieved the first aid kit, and began to clean Ronan’s wounds.

Part of him was surprised that Ronan let him, but after all, it was the only thing he could do, short of walking around with open wounds. Adam washed his hands, cleaned the blood away and made sure nothing was deep enough to need stitches - they had the supplies, just in case, but Adam wasn’t sure his hands were steady enough for that. Thankfully, it looked like gauze and bandages would be enough.

He bandaged Ronan’s arms, focusing on his work as things steadied around them. As he realized how odd it felt to be alone in a room with Ronan facing him after days of careful avoidance. He put his attention instead on binding the wounds, on noticing the way they echoed the scars inside Ronan’s arms, the ones Adam had touched in the church. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

Standing, Adam reached out to wipe the blood from Ronan’s face. Ronan flinched away.

He hadn’t when Adam touched his arms. Adam didn’t know if this meant that Ronan had been too out of it before, that the cut on his face hurt more, or that he just didn’t want Adam touching him there. He tried not to read too much into it, and simply held still.

Ronan stared off into the corner of the bathroom for a long moment. Then he sighed, low and quick. “Fine. Do it.”

It felt like the first time Adam had heard Ronan’s voice in a long time. Maybe it had been. 

Adam wiped the streak of blood from Ronan’s face and began to tend to the wound there. It was small, less serious than the others, and everything about tending to it felt strangely intimate. Ronan wasn’t looking at him, but in a determined way, as if he were incredibly aware of Adam’s presence so close to him. Or maybe that was projection - maybe it was just Adam who was so incredibly aware.

“I don’t always have good dreams,” Ronan said. Adam could feel Ronan’s jaw move beneath his fingers, the slide of bone and muscle against skin.

It was an explanation, but one that Adam had already mostly guessed. There was nowhere else that monster could have come from.

“A nightmare,” he said, voice quiet. He wondered at the strange shape of Ronan’s nightmares. His were more prosaic: a cramped trailer, someone else’s anger, helplessness. Perhaps since Ronan was an impossible thing, so were his dreams, so were his nightmares. “That wasn’t the first time?”

Ronan shook his head, a brief movement that pressed his cheek against Adam’s fingers.

Adam unwapped a bandage. “I felt something when it happened. I think.” That made it sound like he was unsure. He wasn’t. He’d felt something, just like he was seeing flickers in the mirror over his shoulder every time he glanced at it.

He didn’t know what to do with any of this magic. Ley lines. Nightmares. He thought of the tarot cards tucked away in his bedroom, the ones he hadn’t touched. How long could he ignore this? Something had changed inside him, it was more evident every day.

“Huh,” Ronan said, and finally looked at him.

Adam looked back, and thought, senselessly and foolishly, of the press of Ronan’s lips against his in the kitchen. How badly he’d wanted it. How badly he still wanted it, despite Ronan’s anger.

He was such an idiot.

He wanted so much, and he knew that it was impossible. So, instead, he gave.

He pressed the bandage to Ronan’s cheek, securing it there. His fingers lingered for a long second before he stood back, putting space between them, and spoke.

“You saw my mother. You saw - how I reacted. I left with Mr. Gray because my father is a violent man, and because my mother allowed it. I left because I didn’t have a future anymore.” He had been afraid, so afraid. He hadn’t been able to think about anything beyond that fear, not really, even though he hadn’t realized it at the time. The effect of focusing so hard on survival, on escape, meant that everything else faded away.

If he had been thinking clearly, if fear had not been running his life, would he have gone with the Gray Man? Would he have chosen this life?

It wasn’t worth thinking about. If he hadn’t gone, he might well have ended up dead.

“I didn’t know about your father then, but I did know what Mr. Gray was. I’m not asking for your forgiveness. I just want you to understand.” That Adam may be guilty of plenty of crimes, but that he wasn’t - he tried not to be - a monster. He had nothing to offer Ronan but the truth that no one else knew, no one except Mr. Gray.

Ronan looked at him for a long moment. Adam couldn’t read his expression, couldn’t read anything from his blue eyes. He looked back.

“We’re not friends,” Ronan said, and Adam felt something inside him twist. But Ronan was calm, the anger he’d felt when they’d last spoken gone. Adam didn’t know what to make of that, didn’t know what to think. But Ronan was talking to him, and looking at him, when Adam was not sure that would ever happen again.

It was something. It had to be something.

Ronan stood, and suddenly the bathroom felt too small, he felt too close. The sheer physical existence of Ronan Lynch, right next to Adam, felt like too much. Adam wanted to reach out, or he wanted Ronan to reach out.

It was true, they weren’t friends. They couldn’t be, not after all of Adam’s lies.

But it no longer felt impossible that they might, someday, be something.

“Let’s go get rid of that fucking piece of shit bird corpse,” Ronan said.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back to Henrietta, and all the problems that come with it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've had a total of 3 days off this month, all of which involved some kind of social obligation. I haven't had any time to write. Sorry this took so long! Hopefully things will be less busy from now on.

In the end, they called the Gray Man.

Adam tried to figure out a way - any other way - to get the bird-monster’s corpse out of their apartment complex without notice, but not having a car made it impossible. They might be able to get the thing out of the apartment, but dragging it far enough to bury or burn would almost certainly invite suspicion. Even wrapped up in spare sheets, it looked like a body.

So there was only one choice. Mr. Gray came quickly, as Adam knew he would. He had never left Adam waiting for an answer, or unsure if he would show up when he was needed. Mr. Gray was many things, and reliable was one of them.

When he saw the remains of the monster, he made a soft _hm_ noise, but said nothing else. Ronan watched from the hallway, spiky and poisonous.

Adam knew that would explode eventually. Ronan lasted longer than Adam had expected, though - long enough for them to load the corpse into the car’s trunk under cover of darkness, long enough to drive to a forested area, long enough for them to bury it.

Mr. Gray had offered to do it alone. Adam had only shaken his head. He had little to offer, but he could help Ronan with this.

Besides, he needed to move. He didn’t understand entirely what was going on with him - wasn’t sure it was possible to understand - but ever since the forest, since Whelk’s death, since the sacrifice, things had been different.

That was what was on his mind when Ronan finally exploded.

They’d loaded the shovels back into the car. Ronan turned to Mr. Gray, and said flatly, “You killed my father.”

It was not a question. It was far more than a statement. Adam tensed, watching them. He had long since known when violence was about to explode, a skill Mr. Gray had not needed to teach him. It bubbled under the surface now, from the tension in Ronan’s shoulders to the look in his eyes to the way his hands curled into loose fists.

“Yes,” Mr. Gray said, simply, and Ronan punched him.

He let it happen. Adam could see that, too. Though he had never taken well to hand-to-hand fighting, he knew that Mr. Gray was more than skilled. Ronan hit him because Mr. Gray allowed it. One strong punch from an angry, grieving teenager was something he would allow, though Adam did not know if he would call that kindness.

Repayment, maybe. He had taken Ronan’s father from him. The least he could do was offer him that.

Adam didn’t think Ronan would see it that way. He ran hot, all fire and ferocity and anger barely leashed. Unlike Mr. Gray, who was cold and thoughtful and careful. Unlike Adam, who had crushed all his own heat away. He could not have survived by lashing out. It was the only thing he could do, back in that trailer.

He didn’t know if he wished he could act on his anger or if he feared it more than anything.

He watched Ronan hit Mr. Gray, and he didn’t intervene. He watched as Ronan tried to do it again, and this time Mr. Gray punched him neatly in the stomach and pushed him back to land on the ground, hard. One punch was repayment. More than that would be foolishness, because Mr. Gray still had a job to do.

“You killed my father,” Ronan said, between deep gulps of air, “and you sent _him_ to spy on me.”

That stung, but Adam couldn’t protest. It stung, but it wasn’t untrue. He had lied to Ronan from the beginning, and it had taken mere days of knowing him before Adam knew that lies like that would be unforgivable. He had chosen to keep lying, because the alternative was betraying Mr. Gray.

He liked Ronan. He was attracted to him. There was something about Ronan that drew Adam like a moth to a flame, something about him that made Adam want to understand him, help him, know him.

But Mr. Gray had saved his life. The choice hadn’t been a choice at all. Adam’s loyalty, though painful, was clear.

“Yes,” Mr. Gray said again, standing above Ronan. His voice was calm, his eyes watchful. Adam wished he could be so level in times of stress.

“Fuck you,” Ronan spat, “you sick fuck.”

“You would belong to Greenmantle now, if Adam hadn’t spied on you,” Mr. Gray said, still even, though for a moment his eyes flickered to Adam. He would not defend himself, but he would speak in Adam’s defense, and Adam wondered how much he saw. Whether he knew that Adam still valued Ronan’s opinion of him, even if he shouldn’t. Even if it was safer not to. “He has others in his employ, and most of them won’t hesitate to kidnap and torture you - or your brothers - if they thought it would lead them to what they wanted.”

Even without the knowledge that he was the Greywaren, Ronan had been in danger. Adam’s presence in his life had been the safest way - for Ronan - for someone to try to find it. He didn’t want to think about what methods others might have used.

Ronan didn’t say anything, but the anger in his eyes hadn’t diminished. He pushed himself up from the ground. Adam didn’t think the fight was over.

Except then the world dropped out from beneath him.

He could not have said what he saw, what he felt in those moments. It was too much, too overwhelming to understand. It was like a flood of images, except not images. Feelings? Not that either. Just something, something intense, something incredible, and then it was gone.

Then everything was gone. Since the sacrifice there had been things in his vision, voices in his ears, something in the back of his mind. It had been unsettling, but humans - and Adam especially - were resilient. He’d gotten used to it, even if he didn’t understand it, and he’d started trying to figure it out. With tarot cards, meditation, whatever he could.

It was gone for a long time.

When Adam woke up, he was on the ground. Mr. Gray knelt next to him, fingers on his pulse, while Ronan stood in the background, some indefinable expression on his face. Chainsaw watched from a nearby tree, eyes shiny and alert.

“I think the forest needs me,” Adam said. His voice didn’t sound like his own at all. “I need to go back.”

He could not have said how he knew. He just _knew_ , on some unconscious level. Something was wrong with the forest, with the ley lines that gave it power, that let it exist. Something was wrong, and the only person who could fix it - the only person who could even _figure out what was wrong_ \- was him.

Ronan swore, low and creative, and Adam distantly admired the way his voice curled around the sounds. It was more poetic than swearing should be, when it came from Ronan.

He was aware that he did not yet feel entirely awake. Some part of him was held away from the world. It was like when he bore the brunt of his father’s anger, when he seemed to step outside of himself because he could not think of anything else to do. Distant from the world. Only this time, his fear was only a tiny flame within him, instead of the all-consuming thing it had once been. He felt almost safe with the forest curled around his mind, all branches and leaves and warm grass.

“You had better go back, then,” Mr. Gray said. He looked unruffled, like the altercation with Ronan hadn’t happened, like Adam had not just collapsed, but Adam could see in his eyes the truth of things. He wondered when he had become able to read Mr. Gray, if there was a moment to pinpoint or if it had just been a slow process over the months they’d known each other.

He realized that Mr. Gray was worried about him.

Suddenly, Adam didn’t feel so distant. He felt perfectly _there_ , and perfectly embarrassed, as if he had just (for example) fainted in front of his mentor and the boy he was deeply attracted to.

_Fuck._

His ears heated, and he couldn’t look Ronan in the eye. Luckily that wasn’t necessary - luckily he had a million reasons not to look Ronan in the eye, and his childish embarrassment was at the very bottom of that list.

Still. He’d _fainted_. Jesus, how melodramatic.

At least he hadn’t hit his head. Someone had caught him, or maybe the forest had cushioned his fall. That was a tiny comfort.

He dragged his mind back to the immediate issue, the magic curling in the back of his mind, needing him.

“Yeah,” he said, slowly. “I think there’s… I don’t know. Something’s draining its power. I’ll know more if I get close.” Maybe. Probably. This whole magic thing seemed like more of an art than a science, and an art that Adam was not familiar with.

“I’ll take you to Henrietta,” Mr. Gray said, and he looked at Ronan. 

Ronan’s shoulders tensed, and he snarled, “I’m not going back to that fucking apartment with you.”

Adam was not sure if that meant he’d have gone back with Adam, or if Ronan had simply reached his limit and did not intend to be lead by them any longer. He wouldn’t blame Ronan, really. Not after what they had done.

“They’re still looking for you,” Mr. Gray said, his voice even and reasonable, the exact sort of thing Ronan hated. “If you go back to Henrietta, you’ll be putting yourself in danger.”

“I’m fucking in danger everywhere,” Ronan said. “Take me back or I walk back.”

Adam could tell from the look in the eyes that there was no arguing with him. Short of knocking Ronan out and tying him up, they would not be able to stop him.

“We should take him back,” he said. Surprise flickered across Ronan’s face, but Mr. Gray did not betray a moment’s shock. He considered Adam’s words instead, calm and analytical.

“Gansey knows about the danger now, and we’ll both be nearby,” Adam continued, thinking through it as he spoke. It wasn’t ideal. Gansey was a good person, trustworthy and smart, but he shouldn’t have to be in the path of Greenmantle’s men. He had already been through enough with Whelk, with - everything.

But he wanted Ronan to be safe as much as anyone. More, maybe, and it was clear to Adam that Ronan needed space, time. Distance. Adam’s betrayal still stung him, Mr. Gray had been firmly moved to the realm of ‘untrustworthy’. The more either of them tried to control him, the less he would trust them. The more danger he would put himself in.

“I don’t need a damn keeper,” Ronan said, dismissive and angry, but Adam knew he could have disagreed with far more force. He could have stormed off, hands still sore from burying his night horror, and found his own way home, or wherever he wanted to go. And what could they have done?

Adam knew what, but none of it sat right with him. He didn’t think Mr. Gray wanted any of those options either, not really. He had never been willing to seriously hurt or kill teenagers or children, though he’d never flinched from using them. 

“All right,” Mr. Gray said. “I’ll take you both back to Henrietta, for now. Adam, we’ll find out what needs to be done for your forest.” He eyed Ronan. “You’ll still have to keep your head down.”

Ronan rolled his eyes expressively, but Adam knew he felt the danger as keenly as anyone. He’d chosen to come back that first night, after all. He knew it wasn’t only his own life at stake. It would have to be enough, or else they would all end up in a lot of trouble.

They drove back to Henrietta, the car silent and tense. There was a part of Adam that couldn’t help regretting telling Ronan the truth - regretting the loss of the easy, if uncertain, friendship they’d had. The chance of something else. The disappearance of the trust that he had only just begun to win.

But concealing it would have been worse. Ronan deserved the truth, and Adam was certain it would have come out eventually one way or another. Better it come from him, freely given, than at a worse time or from a worse person.

Still. Once upon a time he could have said something, done something, kept Ronan near him.

Now, as he watched Ronan get out of the car and stalk up the steps at Monmouth, he could not help fearing that he wouldn’t see him again.

***

It felt strange to be back.

Ronan had thought it would feel familiar, like a relief, but instead it just felt strange. He had only been at that apartment with Adam for a few days, and it shouldn’t have mattered, but of course it did. How could it not?

He dragged his thoughts away from Adam’s betrayal as best he could, stomping up the stairs and pushing the door open. He did not look back to watch Adam and that slimy fucker Mr. Gray drive away. He would be happy if he never saw them again.

No. That wasn’t true. Ronan was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a liar, and it wasn’t that he didn’t want to see Adam again. Mr. Gray could fall off a cliff for all he cared - Ronan could not look at him without wanting to feel the crunch of his bones as Ronan punched him in the face, fuck, he’d killed his _father_ \- but Adam?

Adam was something else.

He shoved his way inside Monmouth, unaccountably annoyed at the way the door stuck. Gansey looked up from where he was sitting on his bed, surrounded by books and slips of paper, eyes wide.

“Ronan!”

Ronan ignored him, strode across the warehouse to his own room. Maybe more _stomped_ than _strode_ , the impact of his boots on the floorboard unsatisfying. He wanted to break something. He wanted to punch someone who deserved it. He wanted to get in a fight and win.

He waited until Chainsaw had fluttered into his room behind him, then slammed the door. By the time Gansey tentatively pushed his door open, Ronan had found his headphones and had his music cranked up as loud as he could stand it. He could see Gansey’s lips moving, but couldn’t hear a sound. Eventually, Gansey pursed his lips in annoyance or disappointment and walked away.

There was a bitter sense of satisfaction to pushing Gansey away, but it didn’t actually make Ronan feel any better.

Later, after the sun had gone down, he emerged from his room to piss. He was hungry, too, the growl of his stomach more an annoyance than a burning need, but still difficult to ignore.

He left the bathroom and walked to Gansey’s bed, where Gansey sat still surrounded by papers and books. Gansey was watching him, his eyes full of equal parts concern and frustration. 

“Let’s order pizza,” Ronan said. Gansey nodded, a hint of relief crossing his face.

Later, after the pizza had come, Ronan lay sprawled across the floor with a slice in his hand. He didn’t have an appetite, exactly, but he was hungry, and the greasy cheese was satisfying. He wished he had beer, too, but Gansey had found and gotten rid of his last few bottles. Ronan, of course, had checked already.

“Adam called me,” Gansey said after awhile. He said it carefully. “He said you would be staying here again for now.” He did not say that Adam had asked him to watch out for Ronan, but Ronan assumed he had. 

It frustrated him, but fuck, what could he do? Hiding in that apartment with Adam had been driving him crazy for a million different reasons, and they hadn’t been safe anyway. Not with the monsters that could come out of Ronan’s head. The bandages on his arms were proof enough of that.

Gansey would have to help him replace them. That was for the best. Adam’s fingers on his skin had been distracting even through the pain, even through the anger Ronan still felt.

Adam had lied to him, betrayed him from the beginning. Ronan should hate him. Part of him did.

But that didn’t seem to make Ronan stop wanting him.

He shrugged, looking at his half-eaten piece of pizza as if it were a rare and impossible thing. “Ran out of clean underwear.”

“Ronan,” Gansey said, and Ronan knew that tone. It was the ‘we need to have a serious talk’ tone, and it made him want to walk right out of Monmouth. The BMW was downstairs. He could drive 80 miles an hour straight out of town.

Except that it wasn’t safe. Ronan didn’t much care what happened to him, but _Matthew_ -

“What,” he said, deliberately not making it a question, and Gansey sighed.

“What happened?”

Ronan did not want to answer him. He did anyway.

“Parrish is a fucking liar.” He told Gansey the truth, in spare and unforgiving terms. Why Adam had come to Aglionby. That he had not befriended any of them out of real friendship. That he was working with the man who had killed Niall Lynch.

“Oh,” Gansey said afterward. The quiet, hurt way he said it made Ronan’s anger spark, made him wish Adam could see what he’d done.

Gansey, in his own way, was just as shitty at making real friends as Ronan was. He’d thought Adam was one of them. He’d thought Adam gave a shit about him, and not just about some stupid mission for a murderer.

Ronan had thought that too.

Gansey was quiet for a long time, staring at the small cardboard town spread across the floor. Not so long ago, after school, Adam had helped him make a miniature replica of Henrietta’s shitty public library. Ronan had pretended not to care, but he couldn’t stop watching Adam’s nimble, slender fingers as he folded paper so precisely. He’d tried not to think about pressing those fingers to his lips.

He still wanted to. That was maybe the worst part.

“I can see why he would feel he couldn’t tell us,” Gansey said. The heavy formality of his tone was enough to make it clear, at least to Ronan, that he was upset. Hurt. “I suppose he didn’t think he could trust us.”

Leave it to Gansey to try to see it from Adam’s perspective. And maybe that was the actual worst part - Ronan could, too. He didn’t like it, it didn’t sit easy with him, but he knew Adam. He knew Adam _well_ , despite the lies, knew from observation and from long hours spent together at school and Monmouth and wandering through the woods. 

Nothing had forced Adam to tell the truth. He’d chosen to. He’d lied to them, all their friendships were based on a lie, but he had still - soothed the pain of Noah’s death, given them his intelligence and support, spent time that he seemed to enjoy with them. Listened to Gansey’s obsessions, humored Noah’s strangeness, pushed back against Ronan’s occasional cruelty.

He’d shot Whelk, in the end, for them. He’d fought Ronan’s nightmare creature, and bandaged his wounds, and told him the truth. More than one truth, the truth of why he was there and the truth of where he’d come from.

Ronan wanted to hate him. He did, a little. He wanted Gansey to hate him too, but he didn’t think that was possible, not really.

But that wasn’t the only thing he wanted.

“Yeah, well,” Ronan said. “Now we know we can’t fucking trust him.”

That was what it came down to, in the end. That’s what it had to come down to.

But Gansey frowned, and looked down at his hands, and said, “Are you sure?”

Ronan wasn’t.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When you see the name 'Kavinsky', you can always just read it as 'trouble'.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> General Kavinsky-related warnings. Also my deepest apologies that he doesn't get punched in the face.

They drove in silence at first. Both Adam and Mr. Gray were not quite the talkative sort, more prone to quiet observation. In Mr. Gray, this was an impressive skill. In Adam, it still felt like a defense mechanism. One day, he hoped, he would carry it with the same confidence that Mr. Gray did.

It was easy to not talk. Adam didn’t know what to say - didn’t know if there was anything he could say. All he could think about was Ronan. The anger on his face, the tension knotting his shoulders.

No, that wasn’t quite true. Ronan was at the forefront of his thoughts, true, but behind them, through them, wrapped around everything like strangling vines was the forest. Magic. The things he kept seeing out of the corners of his eyes, as if he was just missing them, as if they were waiting for him to look properly.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to. He already felt pieces of himself slipping away. In some ways, it was easier to think about Ronan, the immediate pain of it grounding him, keeping him in the here and now.

Adam had betrayed people before. Little things, sometimes without them ever finding out. Lies to make their job easier. And hadn’t leaving in the first place been a betrayal? His mother, his father, surely they would see it that way on some level. He had thought that they would be glad to be rid of him, and maybe they were, but they’d lost his income too. His help around the trailer. His usefulness as a punching bag.

He had betrayed people before. It had never sat so heavy on his shoulders as it did now.

“He looks like his father.”

It was a calm, dispassionate observation. If Mr. Gray said it, Adam knew it must be true, but he had only ever known Ronan. Niall Lynch was a memory, a ghost, a dead man. If Adam saw him, somehow, he knew that he would think _he looks like Ronan_. Not the other way around.

He looked out the window at the streets of Henrietta as they drove, not really seeing them.

“He isn’t going to forgive me,” Adam said, after a long silence. Ronan was not the sort to tolerate betrayal. He had barely begun to tolerate Adam, barely begun to move them towards something else, when Adam had torpedoed it. There was no coming back from that. And even if there was, how could Adam really think he deserved it?

Ronan wasn’t a toy to play with. But then, Adam had never been playing a game. He had been, was always, trying to survive.

“He seems the type to burn hard and hot,” Mr. Gray said, his hand rising to touch the cheek Ronan’s knuckles had slammed into. Adam could see the telltale signs of a bruise beginning to rise. “It might be fair to assume the worst.” He was quiet as well, matching Adam’s earlier silence, a long moment of the car’s tires against the road. “But I don’t think you should.”

Adam could not see why Mr. Gray would think that, but he didn’t contradict him immediately. It was true, sometimes, often, that Mr. Gray saw things he didn’t. Adam knew by now that he could be blinded by his own emotions, his fears, his anger, his desires. It didn’t happen often, and Adam would be happier if it didn’t happen at all, but when it did Mr. Gray often had a way of cutting through the confusion with calm observation.

He wasn’t sure this was one of those times.

Somewhere inside him, he desperately wished that it was.

“We’ll keep him safe,” Adam said. It didn’t need to be said, but he needed to say it. Mr. Gray only nodded, all cool certainty, and steered them to the curb.

When Adam looked out the window, past everything he could almost seen in his reflection on the glass, he saw 300 Fox Way. The psychic’s place.

He wasn’t surprised. When they knocked on the door, the inhabitants didn’t seem surprised to see them, either. Possibly because they were psychics, even more possibly because Mr. Gray had called ahead.

They were ushered into the living room, all shabby eclectic comfort, and Adam felt a pang of something like remembered longing. How he would have wanted something like this, when he’d been in Henrietta, how he’d known that _poor_ could be something so different than his cold trailer. It was possible, after all.

Persephone drifted in, and with a minimum of chatter waved Mr. Gray out. He glanced at Adam once, confirmation that it was fine to leave him alone, and Adam wondered if he looked that lost, that confused. Normally Mr. Gray would not need confirmation. He trusted Adam’s skill, his cool head, his intelligence.

Adam wanted to be angry at that. He’d never liked being worried over - no. That wasn’t true. He’d never _experienced_ being worried over, and he didn’t know how to react to it, and that tended to make him a little angry. But right now, he wasn’t. Right now, he felt just about as lost as anything.

Persephone hummed softly, settling across from him, tilting her head. “Have you been using the cards?” she asked.

“I tried,” Adam said. “I don’t really know how they work.” He wasn’t lying. He _had_ tried. But the pictures didn’t mean enough to him, and then suddenly they had meant too much, and he’d been frightened. He’d felt like he could fall into them. Fall forever.

“You don’t always need to know how things work,” Persephone said, and he thought he could detect the faintest trace of amusement in her voice. “The difficulty for you is simply feeling.”

He could not deny that. “How do I fix it?”

Persephone was quiet for a moment, watching him with her dark eyes. Then she nodded, and stood. “Blue can help.”

Adam wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, not until Persephone returned with a girl. The girl that had been here last time, the one Gansey had called Jane. Adam remembered her, but not much else - he’d been so preoccupied last time he was here, distracted by what he’d done to himself, distracted by what could happen to Ronan.

She was short and striking, pretty in a way that almost seemed defiant, pins in her hair making it spike out and clothes aggressively artistic. Handmade, or hand-altered - Adam had had to mend his clothes often enough, once upon a time, to be able to see the telltale markings of that here. It should have looked like a mess, all different kinds of colors and prints, but instead it just looked very _her_ , very individual.

Adam liked it.

“Hi,” she said, lips pressed together, eyes wary. Adam didn’t know why she would be, but there seemed to be an endless list of reasons to choose from, so he didn’t blame her.

“Hi,” he said. “I thought your name was Jane.”

She frowned. “I’m Blue. Your rich friend just calls me Jane because - I don’t know.”

Adam could not guess at the reasons Gansey might have, but he was beginning to remember a few things, things that made a bit more sense of the situation overall. “Where do you know Gansey from?”

Blue rolled her eyes. “He and that scowly friend of his come into Nino’s pretty often.” She paused and looked him over. “I haven’t seen you there, though.”

No. Adam had never gone - never since he’d started at Aglionby, anyway. He’d gone a few times before then, when he’d still lived in the trailer park. It was an Aglionby haunt, mainly, but it’s not like there was an overwhelming array of pizza places to choose from in Henrietta. Adam had rarely had the means to eat out, but every once in awhile he’d splurge on a slice or be invited awkwardly by a classmate. He’d been to Nino’s before, and he was aware that people who knew him might go, and so - like most of Henrietta - he’d avoided it completely.

But Gansey and Ronan had gone. They’d invited Adam, more than once, and he’d always refused until they stopped inviting him. Sometimes they’d bring pizza back instead, accepting Adam’s explanation that he just had too much studying to do but plying him with thick, greasy slices of cheese and pepperoni anyway.

And he remembered, now, the day after one of those Nino’s expeditions that he’d missed. He remembered Ronan imitating Gansey’s old money drawl and then a high, mocking falsetto, offended at some social misstep Gansey had managed to make. Adam hadn’t paid that much attention then, but Ronan had occasionally offered up jabs and jokes about Gansey’s crush on a waitress. 

Adam thought he understood now. With Blue in front of him, the appeal was impossible to miss. She was alive, pretty and vibrant and clearly not interested in taking anyone’s shit. Adam had always been attracted to those qualities, that way some people had where they looked at the world and challenged it with their mere presence.

Ronan had it too.

He tried not to think of Ronan.

“I’m not much for pizza,” Adam said, which was untrue, but the truth required more explanation than he wanted to get into. “But it’s nice to meet you, Blue.”

He could hear his own accent wanting to thread into his words. It was being here that did it. At Aglionby, surrounded by all kinds of boys, it wasn’t hard for Adam to suppress his accent. But here, in this house - this was Henrietta, through and through. Not the harsh, cold Henrietta he’d grown up in, but the warm and loving one that he’d always known existed but had never been able to reach. Never really been able to imagine, even.

Some part of him, deep down, wished for it still. Ruthlessly, Adam tried to crush that, but he knew it would not be that easy. Instead, he focused on the problem in front of him.

“I think something’s wrong with the ley line,” he said to Blue. If she lived in this house, surely he wouldn’t have to explain the basics, but even so he didn’t know where to start. “I - fainted earlier. Something’s taking power from it, maybe, and the forest needs me to fix it.” Or at least that’s what he thought. In truth, Adam was flying blind here, despite his visions, despite the cards.

“I’m not psychic,” Blue said, but her forehead creased, and she sat down opposite him, where Persephone had been a moment before. “Can you - I don’t know. See stuff?”

If she wasn’t psychic, Adam wasn’t sure what the point of this was. He frowned, just a little. “Yeah, but I don’t… I can’t really figure it out. I don’t think I’m strong enough.” 

That wasn’t quite right. He wasn’t focused enough. Or maybe that wasn’t the case either - it was like Persephone said. He wasn’t able to let go, to feel. He was too afraid.

“Lay out the cards,” Persephone said. She was standing near the door. Adam hadn’t seen her there, or maybe she hadn’t wanted to be seen. “Blue will help you scry, and we’ll both be here to catch you if you go too far.” She smiled, and it seemed vague, distant. Even so, Adam felt comforted. “You’re not alone.”

He wasn’t. Adam had spent most of his life alone, but since Mr. Gray had helped him walk away, things had changed. He trusted Persephone, too, for reasons that he couldn’t name. And Blue - well, he didn’t know about Blue. But he liked her.

“Okay,” Adam said, and he began to shuffle the cards.

Afterward, he would not have been able to explain what he saw, what he felt. Since Persephone had given them to him, reading the cards had been an odd experience - to say the least. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he seemed to see things no matter what he did. The ley line, the forest reaching out to him, he thought.

He didn’t know what effect Blue was supposed to have, not until he bent over to look at the cards and she touched his arm. After that - 

After that, it was more than it ever had been before. He always saw things, yes, but this was different. This was less seeing, and more _being_. Overwhelming and intense and so much more than he’d expected. The curl of leaves against his skin, the warm beat of sunlight on his hair. Magic in his veins and in the land itself. A stream, stopped where it shouldn’t be, a log fallen where it blocked the flow of power. Little things here and there, things he couldn’t help but take note of, things that should be fixed.

But not the main thing. Not whatever it was that was draining the ley line. That wasn’t something small, wasn’t something he could fix with physical labor.

That was harder to follow. There was no map, no signpost to lead Adam where he needed to go. He simply asked, and the power within him responded - but where it became difficult was how to ask, and how to interpret what he saw.

There was a sense of loss, of something stolen. A thief creeping in by night to take things that were not rightfully theirs, and the first thing Adam thought of was Ronan.

But no, that wasn’t right. _Greywaren,_ he heard in his thoughts, in his bones, a firm and sudden refusal. Not Ronan. That, at least, was a relief. Adam did not want to hurt Ronan again.

As if it could feel his guilt, the magic seemed to curl, seemed to tug at him. To ease along the path of his thoughts and coax his guilt from him.

Adam pulled back then, as much as he could, clinging tight to his emotions. This guilt was something he had earned, something he needed to carry. He had done nothing to deserve the loss of it, although at the same time he found himself awash with wonder that this thing - this creature, this forest, this magic - he was connected to had wanted to… what, comfort him?

_Show me what is hurting you,_ Adam thought, throwing his plea out into the vastness. That was what he was here for, what he needed to know, what he had to fix most of all.

And, finally, it did. A place, a bony figure, a face.

A face that Adam recognized, though it took him a moment to place it. Joseph Kavinsky meant nothing to him besides an associate of Ronan’s, a mild annoyance, another rich boy who thought he was above petty things like the laws of man.

And, apparently, the laws of magic.

It wasn’t what Adam had been expecting to see, but it was an answer.

His confusion distracted him, and that image of Kavinsky was swept away, a leaf in a stream. He saw other things, then. Growing spirals of green leaves. A deer stepping through a clearing. A man, unfamiliar, staring into a pond. The nightmarish figure of his father shouting. More. It felt like there was an answer, a real answer, an answer to a question Adam didn’t know how to ask, and it was just out of reach.

He reached for it, and reached further, and then all of a suddenly came back to himself. He was in Persephone’s living room again, and his cheek stung. Blue sat before him, eyes wide, hand still raised. She’d slapped him, he realized, and for a moment he felt anger.

“You were wandering,” Persephone said, and he could not stay angry when he realized that she was right. He’d almost gotten lost. It had been more vivid, more _everything_ than it ever had been before. He’d seen things, felt things, almost lost himself. 

He looked at Blue, realizing. “Was that you?” he said, and he watched as her lips tugged into a slight frown. She shrugged, looking away.

“I make things stronger,” she said, almost reluctantly.

“You didn’t really need to be stronger,” Persephone said, her gaze distant and her smile vague. She set a plate of pie in front of him. “You needed to let go.”

And Blue’s presence had done that, Adam realized. Whatever she had done, whatever she was, had intensified his powers and his connection to the ley line. It had pushed past his hesitance, his unwillingness to let go and simply feel. 

He wasn’t sure he liked that, but he had to admit it had worked.

He digested what he’d seen, what he’d felt. He wasn’t sure it _was_ digestible, not really, there didn’t seem a way to pick it apart and categorize it the way he would like to. But some things were clear. Some things did not need categorization.

“The ley line needs to be stronger,” he said, thinking of all the little things that were holding it back. Rocks to move, stream beds to clear, trees to plant. In the long term, there would be even more. It had been a long time, a very long time, since anyone had tended to the forest.

“That’s it?” Blue said, raising an eyebrow in disbelief. 

“No,” Adam said, and sighed. “I need to talk to Joseph Kavinsky.”

***

Blue had insisted on coming with him. She knew Kavinsky - or knew of him, at least, and didn’t everyone here? Everyone their age, anyway, everyone who went to Aglionby and most of the townies too, everyone who wanted something to get them high or ease their pain or hurt them.

Adam had never had much use for him. Now it seemed he should have paid closer attention.

When he loaned them his car, Mr. Gray had also told them about Kavinsky’s appearance while he was at Monmouth. It was a clue, another one, and Adam thought he was beginning to see the shape of things.

The only problem was where to find him, and Blue seemed to have an idea about that. They drove to the edge of town, to an abandoned field littered with expensive cars and dissolute rich boys. Adam watched her lip curl in disdain.

“What a waste of space,” she said. Adam couldn’t find it in himself to disagree. The trappings of wealth didn’t sit comfortably on him. He didn’t think they ever would.

They climbed out of the car and ventured into the field. Kavinsky wasn’t near the bonfire, big and bright even though the sun hadn’t yet gone down. He wasn’t among the clusters of boys sharing six packs, or a handle of vodka, some of whom called out to Adam like they knew him. Blue shot him a glance.

“We go to the same school,” Adam said, a weak explanation that she already knew. The truth was, Adam didn’t know the names of half these boys, and assumed they only knew his because he was Gansey’s friend. Everyone knew Gansey. 

For Adam, who had always been ignored, it was an odd feeling to be recognized for any reason. Not necessarily a pleasant one.

They found Kavinsky on the edge of the circle of cars, very obviously selling a baggie of pills to a girl who looked at Blue, dazed, and then walked away. He didn’t bother to make the transaction look like anything but what it was, but Adam supposed it didn’t matter. He’d never get arrested, and if he did, he’d just buy his way out. There was no chance the Henrietta cops didn’t already know about Joseph Kavinsky, street racer and drug dealer and property damager. They just didn’t want to bother with his kind of trouble.

Adam generally preferred not to either. It was messy and flashy, and all these months in Mr. Gray’s world had taught Adam how pointless that was. Even before that, he had considered drugs a waste of time at best - now, he found he could summon up little more than contempt for Kavinsky’s choice of hobbies.

But apparently those weren’t his only hobbies.

“Kavinsky,” Adam said, approaching him. Kavinsky looked up, a flicker of bloodshot eyes and a slice of smile.

“Gansey’s pet,” he greeted them affably. He glanced at Blue, then dismissed her. “And some whore.”

Adam felt Blue bristle next to him. He wasn’t going to stop her if she wanted to lay one on Kavinsky for that, but after a moment she visibly calmed herself. She’d told him, before they came, that she was going to be his backup. Apparently she was taking that seriously.

“Rich waste of space,” she said, greeting him in return, pleasantly.

“You buying?” Kavinsky said. He reached into the driver’s side window of the car he was next to, retrieving another baggie of pills. “The orange ones’ll really get you going. Didn’t think that was Dick’s style, but hey, if you’re all gonna take a turn on her, you’ll need the energy.” He grinned, sleazy and pleased with himself. “Hard to imagine Lynch getting it up for a girl, but I guess he’ll do what he’s told. Like a good dog.”

The content of Kavinsky’s words was so blatantly meant to be offensive that Adam dismissed it out of hand. He got some kind of joy out of getting a rise out of people, Adam was sure, but he didn’t have the right weapons. Adam really didn’t care what Kavinsky thought of him, or if Kavinsky thought of him at all. 

He could admit, only to himself, that he didn’t like the way Kavinsky talked about Ronan. But he didn’t really have the right to get offended on Ronan’s behalf. Especially not now. He didn't like the way Kavinsky talked about Blue, either, but he'd only just met her and he already knew she was more than capable of taking care of herself.

“You’re pathetic,” Blue said, teeth bared, and Kavinsky smiled at her.

“We aren’t here for pills,” Adam said. He wanted to get this over with. He was also getting concerned that Blue would genuinely hurt Kavinsky, and he wasn't prepared for the consequences of that, whatever they might be. “Whatever you’re taking from the forest, you need to stop.”

Kavinsky squinted at him. “What the fuck?”

“Your dreams,” Adam clarified. It was a guess, just a guess, that whatever Kavinsky was doing was the same thing Ronan did. Or similar. “You’re draining the ley line. It has to stop.”

Tossing the baggie of pills back into the car, Kavinsky stalked toward them, ignoring Blue now, focused on Adam. “Did Lynch finally figure out he’s not the only one around?” He looked Adam up and down, dismissive. “Hard to believe he’d send a nothing like you to do his dirty work.”

Adam firmly squashed his surge of annoyance. There was no point in letting Kavinsky get under his skin. He didn’t know what he was talking about, anyway.

“I’m asking you politely,” Adam said, though he supposed his tone was not particularly polite. “You need to stop.”

“I don’t _need_ to do anything,” Kavinsky sneered, turning away now. “Go run back to Lynch and tell him to talk to me himself.”

Adam knew that the truth - that Ronan had nothing to do with this - would only cause problems. And in reality, he had not expected quiet compliance. Not from Joseph Kavinsky.

“We’re wasting our time here,” he said to Blue, and she nodded, though her gaze of dislike did not waver. 

He’d asked, and been refused. That didn’t matter - that was what he’d expected, though somewhere in the back of his mind had been the faint hope that it might work. The more important thing was that now he knew for sure what Kavinsky was doing. He didn’t know why it was different when Ronan did it, but it was, and the ley line and forest were suffering for it.

It was information, and that was always the first thing they needed before taking action.

They walked back to the car, and Kavinsky did not follow, did not speak to them again. But as Adam climbed in, he could see across the field that Kavinsky was watching them.

He was going to be a problem.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ronan and Adam both deal with their conflicted feelings, sometimes even in sort of constructive ways.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello friends, I've been starting a new job and navigating a bunch of other stuff, so writing time has been slim on the ground. I'm still working on this fic and another, though! I'm not dead yet.

Some part of Ronan had thought that he would feel less trapped back at Monmouth, in Henrietta again. He didn’t know why he had thought that. Stupidity, maybe. Shortsightedness. Hope.

The fact was, he still wasn’t free to live his life. He couldn’t go out and drink, he couldn’t find trouble, he couldn’t race. Or rather, he could do those things, but there was a good chance he would end up finding far more trouble than he could deal with.

Sometimes that was tempting. Sometimes the prospect of freedom seemed worth the chance of danger. Sometimes the danger itself seemed appealing.

But even if he couldn’t entirely extinguish the itch beneath his skin, the thought of Matthew stopped him. Besides, he’d only been back for a day. Things would change - things had to change. 

He couldn’t stay inside, though.

Ronan stalked past Gansey, who was sitting on the floor, carefully gluing one wall of a cardboard building to another. He caught Gansey’s concerned look, and scowled. “I’m not going anywhere. Just need some fucking air.” He hated this.

Chainsaw fluttered after him, and he held the door open long enough for her to swoop through it. Outside, the sky was gray, threatening rain but not quite delivering. His BMW was there, next to the Pig, and he thought about getting in and driving. He thought about leaving all this bullshit behind. Wouldn’t that be safer for everyone, if he just got lost? What the fuck was he waiting for anyway? For the Gray Man, his father’s murderer, to protect him? For Adam, who had lied to him, to find a way out of this mess?

And how did he even know they were telling the truth? They were both liars.

Ronan knew, though, that it was his anger that made him think that. He wasn’t stupid enough to believe it. Adam had lied, his mentor was a murdering fuck who Ronan would never forgive, but there was no reason for them to lie about the danger he was in. It made no sense for them to do so, and he didn’t think Adam had lied about any of that.

He had always known there was something different about Adam. It wasn’t just his bone-deep attraction to that skinny boy, all dusty hair and sharp eyes and beautiful hands. It was the careful evasion, the desire to talk about anything but himself. The easy way he slid past questions he didn’t want to answer, as if he’d had experience with it.

Ronan might have known from the beginning, on some level. But he’d grown to like Adam anyway, to want to spend time with him, to want - more.

And Adam had kissed him back. Had that been a lie too?

He didn’t think so. He didn’t know.

He never wanted to see Adam again. He needed to see Adam, to look in his eyes, to figure out the truth. To press his fingers against Adam’s skin.

He kicked the BMW’s tire, Chainsaw settling on the roof with a harsh caw.

“Don’t fucking chip the paint,” he said, and scowled at her, and that’s what he was doing when the Evo pulled into the lot.

He recognized Kavinsky’s car. He would have recognized it anywhere, after all those restless nights when he’d outpaced its driver. Kavinsky always seemed down to race when Ronan couldn’t find a way to feel comfortable in his own skin. He wanted to race now, but the addition of Kavinsky himself to the mix was less desirable. 

He’d held a certain appeal once, one that Ronan had not wanted to face fully. Now he could understand the sting of repulsion and attraction that had curled together within him at the sight of Kavinsky, now that he had felt something much stronger, much more impossible to ignore.

Kavinsky climbed out of his car, a devil’s grin on his face. It might once have been repellently attractive, like a fistfight or getting blackout drunk, but now Ronan had found something that dug its claws into him much more effectively.

If he wanted to hurt, all he had to do was think about Adam Parrish.

“Lynch,” Kavinsky said. “Where have you been hiding?”

“Fuck off,” Ronan said. He couldn’t race, so he had no use for Kavinsky. He was a blot on the landscape of Monmouth’s parking lot, where Ronan could find a bat and some empty bottles and go to town, working out some of the frustration that burned inside him. A bat and Kavinsky’s face was a not unpleasant thought, especially when Kavinsky was smirking at him like that, but mostly Ronan just wanted - needed - to be alone.

“I can’t believe you sent Dick’s little bitch to talk to me instead of doing it yourself,” Kavinsky said, walking closer. “What, too afraid to look me in the eye?”

Ronan’s brow wrinkled. “What are you talking about?”

“ _You need to stop,_ ” Kavinsky said in clear imitation of someone, except Ronan had no idea who or what he was talking about. “You thought I was just gonna do what you told me? You think you’re the only one who gets to dream?”

Ronan was silent, thoughts whirring, eyes on Kavinsky but not seeing him, not really. He didn’t want to believe this, not really, but suddenly some things made sense. Sideways remarks Kavinsky had made in the past, the way he always seemed to have ways to get whatever people needed.

Easy, when you could pluck whatever you wanted out of a dream.

“I thought he’d be here, man,” Kavinsky said, looking around. “Running right back to you and Dick to cry about how I didn’t listen. Aren’t you all joined at the hip?”

“Parrish talked to you?” Ronan said, putting another piece together. He couldn’t see the whole picture, it didn’t quite fit, but - there was no one else Kavinsky could be talking about.

Kavinsky looked Ronan up and down lazily, but there was something sharp in his eyes. “Oh. He _didn’t_ tell you. Now that’s interesting.”

Ronan didn’t think it was that interesting. There was so much Adam hadn’t told him, so many secrets, that Adam going to speak to Kavinsky was almost meaningless among them. Kavinsky was missing too many pieces of the puzzle to realize that, but Ronan was missing a few as well. He stepped forward.

“You can do it too.” It wasn’t a question. Besides Ronan, besides his father, he hadn’t known there were other dreamers in the world. He didn’t know what he would have done with this knowledge before.

He didn’t know what to do with it now.

Except that Adam had spoken to Kavinsky, had told him to stop, and that meant Kavinsky was the one draining the ley line, the one affecting the forest.

That made sense too. Kavinsky had never had much in the way of self-control. If there was something he wanted, he got it, and now Ronan knew that a lot of that had to do with the dreaming. Their dreaming.

“You know, Lynch, I really thought you’d figure it out on your own. And faster than this, too.” Kavinsky walked toward him, a smirk curling across his face and disappearing. “But then, you’ve never really known what you were doing, have you?”

Ronan scowled. It was less the content of Kavinsky’s words and more the tone of them - insinuating, slick, as if he knew more than Ronan ever would.

And maybe in some ways that was true. Some part of Ronan wanted to ask, wanted to learn about this gift, this curse that he’d never been able to properly control. Who could he learn from? His father was gone. Kavinsky was the only option.

But he wasn’t really an option. Not with the careless way he moved through the world, not with the things at stake. Ronan would have to find another way, or make his own.

“Fuck off, Kavinsky,” Ronan said, leaning back against his BMW. He didn’t want to look at Kavinsky anymore. His decision was made, so there was no point. “You’re fucking up the ley line. Listen to Parrish.”

He wondered how that meeting had gone. He didn’t think either of them had thought much of the other before - Kavinsky clearly still considered Adam nothing more than Gansey’s hanger-on, and Adam had never showed anything but mild disdain and disinterest towards Kavinsky. He thought it was likely Kavinsky was still underestimating Adam Parrish.

After all, they all had. But that seemed to be the way Adam liked it.

Kavinsky’s expression went dark, eyes raking over Ronan, taking in his posture and the dismissal in his voice. “You have to be kidding me.”

“Nah,” Ronan said. “I’m pretty serious about you fucking off.”

Kavinsky was still for a long moment, and then he laughed. “It’s just the two of us, Lynch. You’re making a big mistake.”

“It’s not the two of us,” Ronan said, looking at him again, eyes narrow. “It’s you, and it’s me. We aren’t two anything. Now fuck off.”

For another long moment, Kavinsky stood there, watching him. Ronan wondered if this was going to turn into a fight. He wondered if it was going to turn into something much worse. He wondered if he knew what he was doing, but only for a moment. Whatever Kavinsky knew wasn’t worth the trouble he would bring - had already brought.

Finally, Kavinsky left, revving his Evo out of the lot with a squeal of tires and a spray of gravel. Ronan watched its taillights recede.

This probably wasn’t over, but he had other things to worry about.

***

“What exactly is it that you need to do?” Gansey’s tone was meticulously polite, his posture careful, his attitude not that of someone speaking to one of his closest friends.

That was Adam’s own fault. He’d lied, and then he’d told the truth, and he’d known Ronan would tell Gansey. He’d known how this would end.

He hadn’t known how much he would wish for it to be different.

“I need help fixing the ley line. Its energy isn’t flowing right, and not just because it’s being drained. If I fix it, it’ll be easier for me to use it, it’ll be easier to - well, keep things from going wrong.”

“Noted,” Gansey said. “So why exactly am _I_ here?”

That stung worse than Adam had expected. _Because you’re my best friend, because you’re one of my only friends, because I know you would love this kind of thing normally, because I don’t know how to apologize in a way that doesn’t seem hollow._

The words stuck in his mouth.

“Well,” Blue said, “you have a car, trust fund baby, and neither of us do.”

Adam almost smiled. Asking her to come may have been the only good idea he’d had in days.

They’d returned to Henrietta a week ago. He hadn’t spoken to Ronan or Gansey since then, hadn’t been able to seek them out himself. Partly that was because he was afraid of the welcome - or lack thereof - that he would receive, but mostly it was because he’d been busy.

Whatever he’d inherited with his terrible sacrifice in the forest, he didn’t know how to use it. And that wasn’t a situation that could remain, not with the danger they were in. So he’d divided his days between studying on his own - whatever he could find on the internet, in books Mr. Gray ordered, anywhere at all - and studying with Persephone.

He had, after some internal struggle, returned to classes at Aglionby. The difficulty of seeing Gansey there (Ronan didn’t bother to show up) had been balanced by his need for a continued cover story, their general need for things to seem the same. The more they managed that, the safer Ronan would be.

Besides, Adam still found schoolwork to be an odd sort of comfort. It had answers, solutions. It had a solid way of achieving success, and if he failed at it, he would know exactly why. If he succeeded, too, he’d know.

The clarity was something he badly needed.

But he hadn’t wanted to face Gansey. He didn’t know what to say, how to explain himself, and he had so much on his mind already. Too much. They only had a couple classes together, which had made it easier - he just took care to enter at the last moment and leave as quickly as possible. Gansey had tried to talk to him, once, and Adam had put his head down and rushed out.

It hadn’t felt good. Adam wasn’t proud. But he wasn’t proud of any of this, and he didn’t know what else to do.

But it couldn’t be put off forever - he hadn’t _wanted_ to put it off forever. Ronan would probably not forgive him, but Gansey… Adam at least wanted to try to explain himself. Their friendship mattered to him. It had meant something. He didn’t want that to be destroyed.

Plus, anytime he learned anything about the ley lines he spent half the time thinking how delighted Gansey would have been to be learning it alongside him. The thought was painful, spiked with guilt, inescapable. When Persephone had helped him scry and he realized what he needed to do, it was Gansey he thought of first.

He had not known if Gansey would come, but now he was here.

They piled into the Pig, Adam taking the backseat. It felt strange to be in there without Ronan, but it was not a surprise that he wasn’t there. Adam had said he was welcome, when he’d asked Gansey to meet them, but he’d held little hope that Ronan would come.

He hadn’t seen Ronan since they dropped him off at Monmouth a week ago. But at least he was safe. For now.

As Gansey drove them out of Henrietta, into the hills, Adam could feel the ley line pulsing beneath his skin. It was easier now, now that he’d begun to learn how to set his thoughts aside. That had, of course, been the hardest part. 

It felt sometimes like he could simply reach out and mold the power however he wished. It belonged to him as much as he belonged to it, and that knowledge was sobering. Adam had done what he’d done because it was necessary, and he was beginning to realize exactly what he had kept from happening. 

Adam was not even comfortable with the amount of power he knew he could use if needed. He didn’t want to think about what Whelk might have done with it.

He’d done nothing. He didn’t know how. Adam’s caution had been in him since birth, beaten into him further by his father and each day of his young life. He couldn’t simply reach out, not knowing the consequences. He could scry, and he could center himself, and he could feel the power around him. But using it? That was something else.

For now, what he needed to do was tend to the ley line. It had been steadier in recent days, though Adam didn’t think that was because Kavinsky had obeyed him. It was chance, or luck, or strings being pulled behind the scenes. It wouldn’t last. Adam needed to strengthen the forest before something happened.

Before Kavinsky started dreaming again. Before Greenmantle arrived, because now they knew he would come. Mr. Gray had disposed of two of his men already - they didn’t have much time left. The ley line was the only real trump card they had, and so Adam needed to strengthen it, to learn how to use it.

He could hear Gansey and Blue talking in the front seat, but the words wouldn’t quite come into focus. Instead he heard wind in his ears, leaves rustling, the soft sounds of water over stones. From the backseat, he watched Blue’s lips move in the mirror, the curl of a reluctant smile, the way her eyes flickered to Gansey and away.

Gansey had a crush on her, Adam remembered with a touch of surprise. He’d spent some time around Blue this week, and he would be lying if he said he couldn’t see what Gansey saw in her. She was smart, fierce, entirely herself. She didn’t care what people thought of her, she only wanted to forge her own way.

Adam had always been attracted to those qualities.

“Here,” he said, barely realizing he was about to speak. Gansey caught sight of the gravel access road Adam had seen - had been told about? He wasn’t sure. One moment he’d been sunken half in his own thoughts and half in the ley line, the next he’d known with absolute certainty that they needed to turn down this road.

They turned, the Pig bumping along until they ran out of road. Piling out of the car, Adam lead them into the woods, to a stream that was clogged with stones and a small fallen tree, impeding the flow of the water. Adam knew in his bones that it needed to flow, and he told Blue and Gansey.

Blue shrugged and began moving stones, and Gansey went to the tree. Hesitating for a moment, Adam gathered his courage and followed Gansey.

“I’ll help,” he said. 

Gansey nodded. “I think we’ll be able to lift it easily enough. Does it need to go somewhere, or does it simply need to be moved?”

Adam looked around. “Over there.” That felt right, though he wouldn’t have been able to say why.

They grappled with the tree in silence. It was heavy, but more than that, the branches made it unwieldy. Getting it where it needed to go took much longer than either of them had anticipated, and they were both out of breath and sweaty by the time they were done. 

Gansey looked at him, and the silence stretched between them. Finally, he broke it, which was a relief - Adam wanted to, had wanted to, but didn’t know how.

“You haven’t talked to Ronan.”

Adam looked away, gathering his thoughts. The storm of emotions he felt at the thought of Ronan was nothing he could put into words, nothing he could even entirely understand himself. “No,” he said. “I haven’t. He doesn’t want to talk to me.”

“Well, you have been avoiding us,” Gansey pointed out, almost delicately. As if somehow he might not have known, as if it hadn’t been obvious to all of them. “Why am I here?” This time the question was less pointed, more confused. 

“I didn’t know what to say to you.” Adam walked away from the stream, to a low boulder half-buried in the earth nearby. He sat. Downstream, he saw Blue look over at them and then away. Giving them time, giving them space. 

“Then answer a question, Adam,” Gansey said. He followed, standing in front of Adam, a few paces away. “Are we your friends?”

The question hurt. It was not meant to do so, Adam knew. That wasn’t Gansey’s way. He could be careless, thoughtless, but rarely cruel on purpose. In this case, there was no way to ask that question that wouldn’t come with pain, and Adam knew also that he deserved it.

“Yes,” Adam said. He had already decided not to lie to Gansey anymore. Ronan had told him everything, as Adam had known he would, and what did Adam have to lie about anymore? He would be truthful, with Ronan and with Gansey and with anyone else he cared about who got caught up in this.

He didn’t know what Mr. Gray would think of his choice, but it was his choice, and he had made it.

“I haven’t had many friends,” Adam said, and then corrected himself, because he wasn’t lying anymore. “I’ve never had friends. You - you, Ronan, Noah - are the first ones I’ve had, and it was only because I was lying to you.” He looked up at Gansey, meeting his eyes. “It’s complicated. But I had to, and if I hadn’t -”

They would never have been friends at all. They would never have met, probably. What was Adam Parrish without those careful lies to make him the sort of person Gansey would talk to? A poor kid, a piece of white trash who’d run away from home and fallen in with men who were paid to murder. None of that belonged in Gansey’s world.

There was no way that they would have been friends without Adam’s lies to pull them together. Gansey knew that too, knew that the only reason Adam had come to Aglionby in the first place was to find the Greywaren. Adam could see it in his eyes, the knowledge of that.

“I can’t say I’m happy about this,” Gansey said. “About any of this. It - hurts to know that you’ve lied about so much. I feel like I barely know you. Who you really are, I mean. We’ve shared so much, but - who _are_ you, Adam?”

“I don’t know,” Adam said. His path was unclear. Once he’d been certain - once he had been determined to climb his way out of the trailer park, make his own way, build a bright future and never look back. Then he’d left, and his future had become more and more tangled: Mr. Gray, Cabeswater, Gansey, Ronan. 

He wanted to keep them alive and safe. Beyond that, he didn’t know. Especially not with this power running through him, this magic that changed everything.

“This has become rather a mess, hasn’t it,” Gansey said with a sigh, and it was such a Gansey thing to say that Adam couldn’t help smiling. Gansey caught sight of the smile and attempted to force a frown, but the edges of his lips curled. 

“Hey,” Blue called from downstream. “Get off your butts. You can talk and work at the same time.”

Her timing was excellent, and Adam thought she knew that. Gansey flushed a bit when he looked at her, just barely noticeable against his tanned skin.

“You’re a vicious taskmaster, Jane,” Gansey said as Adam stood. Blue smiled, pleased, and turned away again.

“She’s cute,” Adam said, though he was careful to say it quietly enough that she couldn’t hear them. He didn’t know her well enough to be sure, but he didn’t think she’d take it in the complimentary way he meant it.

“Yes,” Gansey said, and he was definitely a bit red now. He turned to Adam, his eyes soft. “Oh, Adam. We’re still friends, of course, so long as you want to be. Just - no more secrets.”

“I don’t think I have any left,” Adam said, truthfully. “Not really. But -” 

He paused, considered, made a decision.

“I’m from here. Henrietta, I mean. Maybe Ronan told you. I’ll tell you how I left, and why.”

“I want to hear it,” Gansey said, “if you want to tell it. But - you have to talk to him.”

“I know,” Adam said. He dreaded and hoped for it equally, not knowing what to expect, but for now - for now, at least, he felt better. With Gansey there, and willing to talk - willing to listen - it seemed possible he could mend things with Ronan, too. “I will.”

They walked back to the water, and Adam collected his thoughts and his words, and as they cleared the stream he told Gansey about the past. With magic swelling inside him, it was easier than it had ever been.


End file.
